[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Steve Lhomme]

En réponse à Matt Zimmerman <mdz at debian.org>:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 12:20:53PM -0800, Russell O'Connor wrote:
> 
> > But in the end, it seems futile.  A big company like Microsoft has
> enough
> > resources to reimplement libFLAC should they wish.  Then they can
> embrace
> > and extend without worry about copyright.
> > 
> > So I would recommend a Public Domain ``license''.  I really don't
> > understand why that choice isn't more popular among developers.
> 
> Releasing a program into the public domain means giving up copyright
> entirely, so that the author has no control whatsoever over how it is
> distributed.  For example, the BSD license allows all of the same
> applications that would be possible with public domain software, but
> requires that 1) the copyright notice remain intact, and 2) the names of
> the
> contributors and the university may not be freely used to promote
> derived
> products.

BTW, what are the concerns here ? You want one library to support the FLAC on
*all* platforms ? Or you just want to make sure that other libraries comply with
the format specified (?) in the main library ?

For the first case, the license matters. For the second it doesn't.

And BTW, Microsoft used some BSD programs (FTP client among others) instead of
making the code from scratch. Idem with MSIE which started with the Mosaic code.