Re: [LAU] Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano

From: Arnold Krille <arnold@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Wed Sep 17 2008 - 22:54:45 EEST

Am Mittwoch, 17. September 2008 schrieb Roberto Gordo Saez:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 08:44:17PM +0200, Arnold Krille wrote:
> > Apart from my last paragraph (about using what suites best) I never
> > talked about my priorities.
> Hmmm... maybe I guessed wrong. Since you seem to support linuxsampler
> in spite of its license, I was thinking that your priority was features
> over freedom.

While I am an open-source freak I am also more in the spirit of use whatever
suits your needs and does the job best.
And if you think linuxsampler is bad because of the non-commercial license,
all art CC-BY-NC is bad. It feels kind of irritating that the ls-guys had to
include such a statement, but on the other hand I do understand their reasons
to do so. They could have refined it to say "without our notice/approval"
which would have helped distributions, but I think all but the core debian
includes linuxsampler without troubles (and debian would be the only
true-non-commercial distribution who wouldn't even get into problems
there...).

So you guessed right, only it was not a direct part of the discussion. (It is
not about me, it is about you:)

> > I never said that fluidsynth isn't free. I only said that both gig and
> > sf2 are not free formats. (free as in defined by the fsf (could have
> > picked any other real-free-organization))
> Now I wonder, in your opinion, what's required to make a file format
> "free" besides its internal documentation? An ISO stardard or
> something "official"?

Maybe "not developed as a closed format and only published later on without
input from the world/community and without room/hooks for extensions".
I don't think I have a definitive answer (apart from that LV2 would be a truly
free format because it allows so many extension you have to ask what actually
is defined by the "standard"), but I think "not a free format because there
is no truly free[tm] implementation" is not a sane way of thinking.
However I do think (and respect) that "I won't support it because there is no
free implementation" is a valid reason for (not) doing something. It is your
time and effort after all. (And I can't wait to get my music machine up and
running again to test your soundfont.)

> > But: I just checked my local tarball of 0.5.1 and while the README states
> > the non-commercial exception, neither the COPYING-file with the license
> > text nor the source-files itself have that exception. But I don't want to
> > restart these old discussions...
> It is not a legal requirement to have the complete license notice in
> all files. There are many sources that don't even include the GPL
> header at all (like the esound sources, if I remember correctly), but
> I agree that it would be much better to always put it, just to be clear.

Well, I am not a lawyer. A while back I tried to get a lawyers opinion to
making some source open source but that lead to three different answer (from
that one guy) so I waited until I was not employed there anymore but still
working on that project...
But what I learned is: You need to state the copyright-holders of each file in
the file. Otherwise it definitely gets lost (it can still "get lost" but that
leads to legal action). And you should state the license.
And the LS-files (that is the source files themself) state "GPLv2 or later".
So from my point of view it would be legal to take the source files, tar them
up with a new readme (without the exception) and publish that.
That wouldn't be very nice to the LS-devs, but as far as I know, it should be
legal...

BTW: that "GPLvX or any later" is somehow dangerous, because you don't know
what the later versions of the license contain. Could be they get bought/sued
by evil opponents and the v4 is not free at all. Would make your code
licensed under a non-free license...

I hate these discussions about legal things. Which is the reason my (private)
codes are (L)GPL.
But I don't despise apps or devs who don't use GPL or apply exceptions. In
fact I am very convinced of Qt.

Have a nice day/evening/night (depending on your timezone),

Arnold

-- 
visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/
---
Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me 
to all your contacts.
After a month or so log in as root and do a "rm -rf /". Or ask your 
administrator to do so...

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Received on Thu Sep 18 00:15:04 2008

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