[Speex-dev] Speex on DSPic, violation of license?

[Jean-Marc Valin]

farhan at phonestack.com wrote:
> I was browsing through Microchips' website and came upon their Speex
> library. They are charging for it and looks like it is also not open
> source.
> http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2005/6/embedded18391.html
> scroll down to the paragraph about pricing.

I'm aware of Microchip's closed-source port of Speex to the dsPIC. As
far as I know (haven't checked the details), this is perfectly legal,
even though I think it's a dumb decision for a company that's in the
business of selling chips. I say it's dumb because by not contributing
the changes back, they ended up not benefiting from significant
improvements I made to Speex since their forked. Had they done so, the
memory requirement for Speex on dsPIC would be smaller than what they
have now and the quality would likely be better. In case there are any
dsPIC developers around, you should know that the current Speex svn/git
version (or 1.2beta2) now has small enough RAM requirement to fit on the
dsPIC, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to create an open-source port
that's actually better (and of course cheaper) than what Microchip sells.

	Jean-Marc