[vorbis-dev] Vorbis license terms?

[Gregory Maxwell]

I should apologise for my knee-jerk reaction. I'm so used to seeing the
claim that the GPL taint is unconditionally bad that I failed to
acknolweldge that in the case of vorbis such a taint is not only a bit
undesireablem but useless.

Were vorbis GPLed and you wanted to use it in your application you could
easily use (with little disadvantage) a standalone program insted of a
linked lib. GPL wouldn't do much good.

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Steve Anichini wrote:

> First, I apologize for opening this can of worms. Second, thank you for
> making libvorbis LGPL'd.
> 
> Third, my two cents:
> 
> A GPL'd codec library is NOT sufficient for unemcumbered development and
> propagation of the standard. In an ideal world, all software would be GPL'd.
> But this is not an ideal world. And just "wishing" it to be so isn't going
> to make it happen.
> 
> I work for a smaller developer that would be interested in using libvorbis
> in the future. We are stuck between the rock and the hard place of being too
> small to be able to afford MP3 royalties and not having the resources to
> develop a codec in house. While someday in the future our game engine may
> become OpenSource, it will never be under the GPL, because we won't open
> source game-specific code - it just doesn't make sense to. Games are
> one-shot things, for the most part, and there is little reuse of game
> specific code from one experience to the next. We reuse the engine - that's
> why we have one.
> 
> Given such a situation we could never use a license such as the GPL that
> would taint the entire game. Thus we can't use any GPL'd components in our
> engine.
> 
> We have already had great success using FreeType in our engine, and it has
> helped us and we've helped them by submitting patches back. It's a win-win
> situation with an LPGL-like license, where we get to benefit from the
> library and the library benefits by the additional resources we spend fixing
> bugs and improving things.
> 
> If you want wide adoption of Vorbis, it makes sense to give the reference
> implementation a license that allows its use in non-open source projects.
> Wide adoption of Vorbis will only happen with the support of Windows-based
> audio players and other applications - for all the talk of Linux, Windows
> still dominates the desktop and that is not going to change anytime soon.
> Windows applications tend to be closed-source, and while that is changing,
> it's not going to change overnight.
> 
> It's not an us vs. them type of thing - closed-source application developers
> can help open-source library developers and vice-versa.
> 
> Compromises have to be made during the battle in order to win the war - I
> would prefer a released libvorbis with a weaker license that has a very wide
> adoption rate over a GPL'd libvorbis that is a niche player because of an
> overly restrictive license.
> 
> -steve anichini
> www.jellyvision.com
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lynn Winebarger" <owinebar at free-expression.org>
> To: <vorbis-dev at xiph.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 10:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [vorbis-dev] Vorbis license terms?
> 
> 
> >     I think it depends on what you mean by seeing the codec succeed.  I
> > would say if people who want to use a codec whose
> > author/designer/inventors don't encumber them via licensing
> > fees/restrictions, then I'd say a GPL codec library would be more than
> > sufficient.
> >
> > > There's nothing that stops someone from taking GPLed code as a baseline,
> > > writing their own very similar version, and using it.  Or for that
> matter,
> > > if someone wrote "WinVorbis" and used libvorbis compiled in, is there
> > > any way to know?  Probably not.  That's what I mean by honor system.
> >
> >      If you have reason to believe your copyright is being infringed by a
> > proprietary software producer, there are legal recourses that don't depend
> > on the honor system.  You can force the vendor in question to produce
> > their source code, if you have enough evidence (how much evidence, I don't
> > know).   Damages in such a case of blatant infringement could easily wipe
> > out a small business who depend on using infringing copies, and put a
> > decent dent even in larger companies.  There are also criminal penalties
> > to be considered for willful infringers.
> >
> > Lynn
> >
> >
> >
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> > Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
> 
> 
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> 

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