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

[David Willmore]

On 10/1/07, Jean-Marc Valin <jean-marc.valin at usherbrooke.ca> wrote:
> 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.

There are a couple of us working on it.  We're both also radio amateurs, so
we hope to keep our work completly free--so it can be used in open standard
software for amateur radio--as well as whatever else people feel like using
it in.  Our code will make its way back into the main tree.

Jean-Marc,  all of your hard work in reducing memory footprint and CPU usage
is wonderful.  Thank you, very much.

Cheers,
David n0ymv