El Mié 05 Abr 2006 15:36, David Turner escribió:

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 11:37 +0200, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:

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Es geschah am Tuesday, 4. April 2006 17:50 als David Turner schrieb:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/) __________________________________________________ Correo Yahoo! Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ”gratis! ”Abrķ tu cuenta ya! - http://correo.yahoo.com.ar