LinuxSampler license, was Re: [linux-audio-dev] fst, VST 2.0, kontakt

From: Dave Phillips <dlphillips@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun Jul 02 2006 - 15:24:09 EEST

Something from the source :

Christian Schoenebeck wrote on 9 Sept 2005:

"Anyway, about the mentioned commercial exception in general: you can assume
all current tarball releases of LS (up to and including 0.3.3) to be under
pure GPL. It was already released as pure GPL and is already included in many
distributions as pure GPL software, so don't worry about that.

However we thought about changing the license in future to one which is more
restrictive about commercial usage and we already placed those commercial
exception notes just to be sure.

The idea about such a possible new license was to allow "direct" commercial
usage of LS only if the commercial actor supported this or another
(important) open source project either directly by contributing code or
indirectly by funding the respective project. So somebody who supported e.g.
the GCC, ALSA or Jack Audio Connection Kit project might also be allowed to
use LS commercially. "Commercial usage" would of course only mean products
based on LS, it would of course not mean using LS e.g. for commercial music
production or something. Such a license wouldn't mean anything negative for
the user, but might "motivate" or force ;) more people to contribute to this
or another open source project, so personally I would find such a license
more beneficial (than GPL for example) for the open source community in
general.

Unfortunately I haven't found an existing open source license which would
reflect those restrictions. Some even said this wouldn't be an open source
license according to definitions of XY, but personally I think it would. So
maybe we would have to write a new license, like a "Participation License" or
something which might also be used by other projects in future of course.

Best,

dp
Received on Sun Jul 2 20:15:02 2006

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