[vorbis] Vorbis licensing...

[Monty]

> We spent a little time here taking a look at 
> the Vorbis licensing scheme and ran into some 
> possible issues. In particular, the Vorbis 
> FAQ page here says that the LGPL license applies
> to Vorbis libraries and GPL applies to source 
> code (at least that's what I gather).

Actually, GPL applies only to the utilities.  All the library source
is LGPL, and yes, we need to update the comments at the top of the lib
source files.

(For clarification, everything in the ogg and vorbis modules are LGPL.
Everyting in vorbis-tools, vorbis-plugins and ao is GPL)

> Reading the text of these Gnu licenses implies 
> that we cannot compile the source code into our
> executable. It implies that we can distribute 
> a DLL with Vorbis in it and that if we have a 
> modified version of that DLL, we need to provide
> source code for it.

That is exactly correct.  You may link against library version of the
object (static or dynamic) and you may modify the library, although
you need to make the changes to the library publically available.  You
may distribute the library any way you wish (so long as you tell folks
where to get the source for it).  You do not need to make any portion
of your code outside the lib public.

> Is this correct? More in particular, exactly how
> can or can't we use Vorbis in a commercial application.
> This specific question is not directly answered in 
> any way in the FAQ, yet it is exactly the question 
> we want to know the answer to.

It's answered as directly as possible without getting bogged down in a
list of examples.  You can extrapolate the acceptable uses (most of
them) from the above rules; really, all the LGPL prevents is direct
incorporation of the LGPL source (whole or in part) into a non-Open
sourcebase, or making closed changes to the LGPL lib.

Monty

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