[vorbis] Vorbis licensing...

[Mercier, Dave]

Hi,

I just wanted to add my 2 cents to the Vorbis LGPL/licensing issues, in case
it helps any.

A bit of background may be in order. I am yet another Electronic Arts audio
software engineer who is responsible for integrating stuff like Vorbis into
cross-platform libraries that are used throughout games in EA World. I found
out about Vorbis when Beta 1 was released, was very impressed with the
quality, and the fact that it is patent free. I'll state now that I have the
utmost respect for the project and it's authors. Since that time I have been
lurking here, and our group has been working on integrating Vorbis into our
technology.

Our main concern was the LGPL. I don't claim to fully understand it, but
what we basically read out of it is that if we modify the current Vorbis
code, we must either contribute that code back, or if we have to integrate
it directly into our game (sometimes we cannot use DLL's), we have to make
our game code available. My second assumption is probably wrong, but we are
still worried about the first. The reason this is a big concern is that we
need to implement Vorbis on a wide variety of systems, for reasons of
efficiency. We may have to develop optimized code for PS2, GameCube, XBOX,
etc. This brings up the following legal concerns:

- We may implement Vorbis on hardware covered by NDA. This might include
something like the PS2's vector unit, XBOX's audio DSP, etc. This means the
instruction set may be covered by NDA (to protect reverse engineering
perhaps), and we can't contribute that code back to the community.
- Similar to above, we may need to include header files or other resources
that are covered by NDA with another party. An example might be a header
file that defines DSP mnemonics or such. I believe another developer brought
up a similar issue related to BeOS a few months ago.
- We may want to optimize Vorbis with some general purpose code that we
might consider a "trade secret" to our company. An example may be an
especially fast mDCT we might already have that could be applied to Vorbis,
etc., but is not generally known.

There are probably more reasons we could come up with as well. I'm not sure
how valid these reasons are, but they scared us out of using the LGPL
version of the Vorbis code. As an engineer, it's not really for me to
personally decide what we can/cannot contribute back to the Vorbis project,
it is more controlled by NDA's, company policies, etc. 

So what we started several months ago was work on our own proprietary Vorbis
implementation, that would free us of the LPGL issues (Anish Dave is working
on it and has posted a few questions here related to it). This work is
coming along fairly well, but now I see in the last week the LGPL issue has
been raised again, and that if it is an issue we may be able to modify it.

So what I am trying to say, is that for us, the LGPL was an issue. I think
it would be an even bigger issue for most other game companies, who may not
be able to afford the development resources we have. We have essentially
spent 4 months re-inventing the wheel, and getting ourselves further away
from the current Vorbis code base (makes it harder to re-incorporate Vorbis
improvements). If we could have used the current Vorbis code, and simply
modified it for our needs, we would have been quickly on our way into
getting it into our products.

If it was possible to somehow remove the LGPL, it would probably make
adoption a lot easier for commercial companies. Of course you may have
concerns that this may affect you in other ways, so perhaps some kind of
compromise would be a good thing. I think even if the code wasn't LGPL'd,
the Vorbis code base may be the same as what you see now, it wouldn't have a
detrimental affect.

Even with LPGL, I'm still very happy Vorbis exists, so my comments are only
meant to relay a real world situation of a commercial company using Vorbis.
As the authors, it's up to you to decide what you want to do with it.

Thanks for listening,
Dave Mercier, Electronic Arts Canada

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