[vorbis] Vorbis licensing...

[John Morton]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000 17:32:15 -0800 "Mercier, Dave" <vorbis at xiph.org> wrote:

> 
> 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.

You can link in the vorbis library object without providing the source
code to the whole program. The LGPL doesn't really make a distinction
between compile time linking and dynamic linking.

>  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.

Basically, you can't use the LGPL library for this, but it's not such a
big deal because the amount of work necessary do most of the things you
mention hear is only a little shy of the work required to build a decoder
library from scratch. Using the vorbis specification over MP+ is still
advantageous from an IP point of view, which I assume is still the prime
motivator here.

The real question is whether it's possible to impliment a vorbis decoder
from the spec without consulting the LGPL code base to figure out how it
all works, and whether that will be perceived as a problem legally.

John

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