[vorbis-dev] Vorbis license terms?

[Monty]

> I guess my BSD-licensed, horribly-unfree software can't use your project,
> eh?

Actually, the consideration here is a partly practical one.  I do want
libvorbis source to remain cohesive and visible.  But mostly, I want to
encourage enterprising souls to go out and clone it, and those who want to
contribute to the mainline to actually contribute and not keep changes/
improvements locked away.  It's not impossible for libvorbis to become BSD/
Artistic/MIT license in the future, but for now I think the LGPL suits us best.

> If you want vorbis to become a standard, the best thing you can do is 
> BSD license it, to encourage adoption.  Pushing a project and a political
> agenda at the same time willl only hurt both goals.

The LGPL wasn't chosen for the political agenda (although it certainly has 
political baggage).

BSD code can use our libVorbis and link to it as a lib; BSD packages may also
modify the lib (or take the lib as an authoritative manual in writing '3rd
party' Vorbis code).  The only way the LGPL taints BSD code is if the BSD code
directly borrows blocks of code from libvorbis.  This I suspect is what you
object to?

> Not that I'm trying to spark a license flamewar here, sorry.  Please take
> my comments with a grain of salt, at best. :)

Not at all!  This is a good debate to have, although perhaps on the vorbis 
list rather than the dev list ;-)

Monty

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