Re: [Muine] Re: Muine (!) Relicensing

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 14:41 -0800, Tamara wrote:
> I dislike using the GPL-with-a-clause. I'm not convinced that is the
> only way to legally play proprietary formats such as MP3. I emailed
> RMS to ask for his opinion (besides his obvious choice of not using
> non-free formats :-) but of course the guru is very busy.

I think RMS' opinion has already been asked more than once. :) 

> I'm not saying I *wouldn't* work on a non-GPL'ed project (and
> GPL-with-a-clause is no longer GPL), but I would try to find a better
> licensing situation. LGPL may be a solution, but only if I can't find
> another way.

I fail to see how GPL-with-a-clause is worse than the LGPL, or the GPL
itself, as the clause only concerns gstreamer plugins. The LGPL is way
more "liberal" than the GPL-with-a-clause ;)

> I don't really understand how GStreamer license affects us. It doesn't
> affect us that  Gtk+ is licensed under the LGPL so why should it
> affect us that GStreamer is? I don't understand why "the plugin nature
> of GStreamer" is a problem.

The fact that GStreamer is under the LGPL is not the problem. I am not a
lawyer, nor particularly interested in the matter (I just want Muine to
be able to play WMA and to be able to be packaged legally), but I share
Matthew's interpretation of the issue.

> I have been thinking about (in the long-run) splitting off
> "MusicManager" and "MusicPlayer" (names I just made up) from Muine
> into separate apps which we could communicate over D-Bus and which
> other music-playing apps, such as RB, could also use. I asked RMS if
> licensing these two apps as LGPL would solve the issue.

I'm sorry, but argh, no. :) There is such a thing as over-engineering.
Muine is just a music player, nothing more. And I really, really, don't
want it to ever become bloatware. Why I started to write Muine is to
have a simple, lean player with a decent, comfortable interface, and no
bloat. Having a separate "music player backend" would in my opinion be
majorly overkill, not to mention how it would bloat the d-bus. 

The "MusicPlayer" would have to be quite sophisticated for starters,
because you need to support having more than one stream open at a time
(for instance one from muine paused, and one from your-random-other-app
playing, for instance). Etc. 

> Before making any licensing changes, I want to wait to see how the
> GStreamer community is moving. We cannot relicense without consulting
> *all* of the GStreamer developers from the past. It is a developers
> right to choose the license that their work will be distributed under.

GStreamer? We're of course not talking about relicensing GStreamer or
anything. If you meant Muine, the number of contributors to Muine isn't
that big, and we can easily find out from the changelog, and mail
everybody.

Jorn