[vorbis] Vorbis licensing...

[Monty]

> Why not put together a list of things Monty / Xiphophorus / all contributers
> are willing to tolerate and not for Vorbis (1) library and (2) example use
> code. I'll start with the following suggestions:

Ah, this brings up another issue.

Sometime soon we need to get around to doing copyright assignment to
Xiphophorus of contributed code.  The practical reson for doing this
is mostly one of perception.  Even open-source friendly organizations
are frightened of being held captive by one developer in a group
throwing a tantrum (that RMS hasn't contributed code eases this
perception somewhat).

The implications of this are:

1) A developer cannot, n days or n years down the road, sue for
copyright violation (for distributing his/her code) or decide to pull
all his/her contributed code from the sourcebase (or threaten to do
so).  Note that this has happened.

2) Xiphophorus can worry less about distributed paperwork when dealing
with license issues/exemptions.

I'm probably missing one or two.

The idea is not to streamline ourselves for remodeling as a facist
software house (or eliminate outside/community input into decisions),
but rather to tie up some of the loose ends that our lawyers warn us
could make us a trivial target for litigation/general avoidable headaches.

Monty

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