[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Joshua Haberman]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 23:25:47 -0800 (PST)
Josh Coalson <xflac at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Joshua Haberman <joshua at haberman.com> wrote:
> > Matt Zimmerman <mdz at debian.org> wrote:
> > > I don't understand...a BSD license grants permission to
> > redistribute the
> > > software freely; it does not make sense to charge a fee for
> > software under
> > > this license because once it is given, the purchaser may give
> > copies to
> > > anyone.
> > 
> > If a company has paid a large sum of money for a BSD-licensed piece
> > of software
> > they intend to use commercially, why are they going to give away
> > copies for
> > free to their competitors?
> > 
> > Still, using a more restrictive license for companies who wish to
> > keep their
> > modifications private achieves the same goals without the risk of
> > letting
> > a BSD-licensed copy go into the wild (assuming you wish to keep it
> > GPL).
> 
> I guess I should clear up, I'm OK now with going BSD for the codec
> libs.

That particular comment wasn't really targetted toward FLAC, it was just some
amateur economic theory about why it might or might not make sense to charge
money for freely-licensed software.

> As for making money licensing, I never had any intention to
> (and still don't).  Nobody but M$/Dolby/Fraunhoffer/etc. can
> get away with that.

I've often wondered whether Rob Leslie has companies that license
MAD from him, since MP3 is such a popular codec and MAD is such
a good implementation.  Why else would he license MAD under GPL
instead of LGPL?  I should ask him sometime.  :-)

Josh

-- 
Josh Haberman  <joshua at haberman.com>