[Musix-Help] Re: LinuxSampler license

Mie Abr 5 17:33:23 CEST 2006

El Mié 05 Abr 2006 15:36, David Turner escribió:
> On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 11:37 +0200, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
> > Es geschah am Tuesday, 4. April 2006 17:50 als David Turner schrieb:
> > > The LinuxSampler download page says:
> > > ---
> > > LinuxSampler is licensed under the GNU GPL license with the
> > > exception that COMMERCIAL USE of the souce code, libraries and
> > > applications is NOT ALLOWED without prior written permission by
> > > the LinuxSampler authors. If you have questions on the subject
> > > please contact us.
> > > ---
> > >
> > > This is a violation of the GPL, because QSampler is linked to Qt,
> > > which is licensed under the plain GPL (or a proprietary license
> > > which you undoubtedly don't have).
> >
> > QSampler != LinuxSampler. LinuxSampler is a sampler backend,
> > QSampler a graphical frontend to LinuxSampler. QSampler was and is
> > released under pure GPL, as well as all other subprojects (either
> > GPL or LGPL) except LinuxSampler itself.
>
> Oh, it looked like they were linked, but I guess they are not.  My
> mistake.  Of course, the new license is not a Free Software license,
> but I think a previous mailing list thread already told you this.
>
> > Why do we have problems with the GPL? Because there are (to my
> > knowledge) some shortcomings. For example LinuxSampler provides an
> > ASCII based network protocol API which allows to control it from
> > anywhere in the network, probably using another OS and programming
> > language.
> > Unfortunately somebody would be allowed to write a commercial,
> > non-GPL compatible frontend to LinuxSampler without violating the
> > GPL.
>
> Any Free Software license will have this issue -- in fact, any
> license which stays within the boundaries of copyright law, rather
> than forming a contract, will.
>
> The issue is that talking to some software over the network isn't an
> exclusive right under copyright law.  This is a shame in that it
> allows proprietary front-ends for GPL software.  But it's a good
> thing overall, because it does allows Samba to talk to Windows
> without violating anyone's copyrights.  It seems to me that the cause
> of software freedom is better served by not hoping for an expansion
> of copyright law to cover interoperability.
>
> A couple of the work-arounds that I can think of are:
>
> 1. Have a convenient and easy library for the protocol under the GPL,
> so that people are tempted to use it rather than writing their own.
>
> 2. Provide a direct way of linking to LinuxSampler, which would be
> faster than the TCP route.
>
> Of course, the more elaborate the protocol, the more effective these
> strategies will be.
>
> > We already had long discussions about this on the mailing list. I
> > would like to refer you there if you question our motivation.
>
> I searched the mailing list, and read a thread from sometime last
> year. The mailing list discussion I read indicated that you were
> concerned about people distributing LinuxSampler for a profit.  I
> hadn't read about the front-end issue before this.
>
> > Again, this is a temporary workaround which will be solved before
> > the next release of LS.
>
> Please do let me know what you come up with.
>
> --
> -David Turner
> GPL Compliance Engineer
> Free Software Foundation

Thanks all of you, for your discussion about Linuxsampler, I hope you 
will license it under a GPL compatible licence. 

Many musicians will need linuxsampler for their music works

cheers,

-- 
Marcos Guglielmetti  
Director del desarrollo de Musix GNU+Linux 
(www.musix.org.ar) (www.pc-musica.com.ar/musix)
(ftp://musix.ourproject.org/pub/musix/)
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