[vorbis] Vorbis licensing...

[Chris Hanson]

My 2 cents:

I like the fact that Vorbis uses LGPL.

I understand Electronic Arts' concerns.  However, I think that if the 
Vorbis license is modified that it still include LGPL-like 
modification conventions.  I don't think it would be right for 
Electronic Arts (or anyone else) to be able to apply a specific 
optimization (such as the fast mDCT) to the reference implementation 
and keep that optimization proprietary; I think that's the cost of 
using the reference implementation.

I think a good compromise for companies like Electronic Arts would be 
to allow developers to incorporate the Vorbis reference 
implementation into a product in binary form without making their 
binary re-linkable *so long as* the Vorbis code is included without 
substantial modification.  In other words, Electronic Arts wouldn't 
be able to use their proprietary fast mDCT with the Vorbis reference 
implementation, but they *would* be able to port Vorbis to a 
processor whose instruction set is under NDA or to a console which 
uses a different build system.

The fact that the specification is public-domain allows companies 
that do want or need to keep their code closed to still do so and use 
Vorbis; they just have to reinvent the wheel during their 
implementation.  (Or they have to buy someone else's implementation. 
It wouldn't surprise me if in a year or so some company is selling an 
optimized, closed-source or "closable-source" Vorbis implementation.) 
I view this as an acceptable trade-off.

   -- Chris


-- 
Christopher M. Hanson <cmh at bDistributed.com>
President & CEO, bDistributed.com, Inc.
Developers of database-backed web sites and Mac software
(847) 372-3955

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