[Icecast-dev] Streaming AAC with libshout?

[Sean McNamara]

So there's our answer ("our" = those interested in AAC support, among other
possible enhancements that encounter upstream resistance, in libshout).

Anyone interested in maintaining a community fork of libshout, under the
same license terms, but with a more pragmatic maintainership? eglibc all
over again, basically?

The great part about open source is that, as long as we comply with the
license terms, the original maintainers *cannot* prevent us from taking the
project in the direction we want it to go. All we need is someone to step
up and volunteer to be the patch manager, come up with a pragmatic, fair
patch review system and release cycle, and come up with a cool name that
doesn't provide even the possibility that someone could confuse our fork
with the original project.

Hopefully we can also find more stuff than just AAC support to
differentiate our fork from upstream, and also hopefully, perhaps some
mainstream Linux distros could be convinced to pick up our fork as a
drop-in replacement for the original libshout. This has happened many many
times before, and the OSes using said forks are generally very happy with
their decisions to do so.

This isn't a knock on Xiph; they can be purists if they want to be. But the
very same software licensing approach they have chosen allows us to compete
with them using their own code as a basis, and offer a superior product
that users will prefer. This is surely something they realize and consider
to be "part of life" -- after all, if they were unwilling to accept anyone
forking their code, they'd have used a non-free license, which would
contradict the very principles Xiph is founded on, so they'd never do that.

Unfortunately I do not have the time myself to be the maintainer of the
fork, but a few of you using libshout for commercial products could
probably justify the time spent maintaining a fork as part of your work
activities to make your product better.

Sean
On Jun 24, 2013 8:17 PM, "Ralph Giles" <giles at thaumas.net> wrote:

> On 13-06-24 2:55 PM, RJ Ryan wrote:
>
> > Respectfully, please change your stance on this issue!
>
> libshout was developed and is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation,
> whose charter is the development and promotion of media technology
> that is open and free for anyone to use. As such it's inappropriate
> for that project to support non-free formats like AAC, no matter how
> popular or convenient that might be for our downstream users.
>
>  -r
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