[vorbis-dev] Vorbis license terms?

[Alexandra Ellwood]

>    How many times does it need to be said, the "free" in free software is
>about freedom and not price?

The free in "free software" is about freedom as well as price, but 
that the freedom should apply to the users of the software as well as 
the authors, right?  Otherwise we should all just go back to 
exclusive use copyrights because those give us the most freedom over 
the source we write.

The GPL denies freedom to commercial users of the software by forcing 
them to the pay licensing fees set by the author (which may be set so 
high that the company can't afford it).  The GPL also denies freedom 
to projects using other free source licenses by tainting code. 
Because all MIT software falls under the MIT (BSD) license, I can't 
use or contribute to GPLed code at work, even though all our source 
is available freely for download.  We don't even make any money off 
it!

I believe the Free Software Foundation originally intended the GPL 
not only to make source freely available to non-profit uses, but also 
to hamper the commercial software industry by denying or discouraging 
their access to the source (something the BSD license failed to do). 
The eventual goal of the FSF is for all software everywhere to be 
GPLed so that any computer-savvy user could get software for free by 
downloading and compiling it.  This is why the GPL is intentionally 
viral -- so that anyone who wants to take advantage of GPLed source 
also has to take the GPL with it.

The Free Software Foundation wants us to give source away to anyone 
who wants it, not make loads of money selling it to large 
corporations (and thus supporting the existence of the for-profit 
software companies).  The GPL was not intended as an excuse for why 
you can't give a company exclusive rights to software they are paying 
you consulting rates to work on.

>    There are a couple of reasons I can think of that someone may want to
>contribute major feature enhancements back: (1) because they want a
>company producing free software to make some money (this would also
>require a guarantee anything contributed back was released under the GPL),

I've never heard of anyone volunteering to answer tech support calls 
at RedHat, despite the fact that RedHat's software is free and GPLed. 
But people contribute to Linux source all the time.  The difference 
is that people personally *use* Linux and if they work on it they can 
get exactly what they want without having to pay for it.

My point is that the primary reason people donate their time to work 
on free software projects is because they want to use the software, 
not so a company can make money off it.  This is the Martha 
Stewart/Norm Abrams mentality: the finished product better if I make 
it myself rather than letting Microsoft/Apple/Sun/etc make it for me. 
Who wants an operating system that says "No user serviceable parts 
inside?"

I'm on this list because I want to add Vorbis support to SoundJam MP, 
a commercial Macintosh encoder/player, so I can use it with my 
Icecast server at work.  There's a one to one relationship between 
the free software I contribute to and the free software I use.

It's actually funny.  I get paid to write software that no one makes 
any money from, but people make money off the software I work on for 
free.

>or (2) because they might work out a deal with some sort of payment for
>the contribution.

True, contributors of large patches can negotiate agreements about 
licensing fees, but what about the hundreds of people who sent in 
several bug fixes?  You can't expect a free software project to send 
each of those people a check for $10 whenever they get a $50,000 
license fee for use of their project!  My point isn't that it isn't 
possible to make this fair.

>    And, of course, they can always fork the project if they like.

Ah forking the project.  That's a disease which is 
license-independent... just look at the FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD 
disaster to understand why you really really really don't want to 
have that happen.

>    That said, I disagree with the notion that only proprietary software
>vendors would make use of the code.  There's plenty of GPL'ed software
>authors out there who would use the GPL'ed version.

My point was that commercial software makes up the bulk of Macintosh 
and Windows MP3 encoders.  If Vorbis is GPLed, these companies will 
be discouraged from adding Vorbis support because they won't see an 
advantage to it.  Who wants to add yet another codec you have to pay 
for (This time one that has less market adoption.)  At least if they 
get an implementation for free you have a chance of convincing them 
that supporting Vorbis is worth it.

If the goal is maximum penetration of Vorbis into the encoder market 
(both free and commercial), then the implementation has to be free 
(price-wise) to everyone.  If the goal is to be a free source project 
then feel free to stay GPLed, but there won't be a SoundJam MP 
plug-in (unless I take a liberal interpretation of the GPL).

--lxs
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Alexandra Ellwood                                               <lxs at mit.edu>
MIT Information Systems                               http://mit.edu/lxs/www/
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