[vorbis] Winamp5

[Michael Smith]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 14:45, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
> Oh, and as for where they say:
>
> ***
> And Nullsoft is not going to say anything about this. It is pretty likely
> that they have been paid to encode to AAC only. Notice how AAC is
> available, but MP3 requires a registration fee? They could do the same for
> Vorbis, but since the Vorbis part is GPL they couldn't stop their users
> from
> distributing the registered plugin
> ***
>
> They are including LAME compiler in the paid version.  They get around the
> part where the GPL would allow it to be distributed by distributing the
> unmodified official LAME dll.  Instead, they use a seperate DLL that gets
> called that does the registration check and then calls the lame.dll.  That
> way people can distribute the lame DLL encoder all they want (just like is
> already done) without any conflict with their code and without giving away
> free MP3 encoding, etc.  The same could be done with Vorbis if they wanted
> to.

This is WAY off track. LAME isn't GPL - if it were, they couldn't do this. 
LAME is LGPLed, so they can. libvorbis isn't LGPLed OR GPLed - it's under a 
much much less restrictive license, which pretty much allows them to do 
whatever they want with it with no restrictions. 

So they could just sell it without having to separate the various parts, 
that'd be absolutely fine.

Mike

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