On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Niels Mayer <nielsmayer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Where http://isophonics.net/QMVampPlugins says "These plugins are > provided in binary form only and may be used for any purpose, or > redistributed for non-commercial purposes only." -- so I guess I'm > good if the QmVampPlugin is provided as a "web service API" Well, the implication is that that's OK if you're not making money from it. > What is confusing is how come there are Linux distros that are > distributing the QmVampPlugins in binary form? Are they "out of > compliance" or do they have a special deal with http://qmul.ac.uk ? No, there aren't any deals like that. I don't know whether individual distributions are in line with the terms or not, I suppose it depends on whether they're non-commercial or not. However, the terms did change a few releases ago -- that non-commercial clause first appeared at some point after 1.0 -- so it's possible some distributors might not have spotted the change. > Any chance you can convince your colleagues to outright open-source > them This question -- which is quite a common one for academic institutions to face -- is not only down to the individual contributors but also the institution, and it's partly a question of intent ("what else can we do with this software?") and partly a practical one ("is there anything in here we can't legally publish that way?") Queen Mary university, like most publicly funded bodies, is pretty open about its work with things like Sonic Visualiser under the GPL, the Vamp SDK under a BSD licence, some open source plugins including the rather interesting VamPy, and various other bits and bobs (see http://isophonics.org for some more stuff we publish). But there are always tricky areas, and at the moment this is one of them. It's a problem that we're going to be trying to make more explicit: we are setting up an institute to try to help academic software development become more open (you can read the initial blurb at http://soundsoftware.org.uk/, it has neutral UK government funding, I'm going to be working on it, and we will be hiring) and as part of this initiative we need to try to work out answers for the sorts of questions institutions (including QM) quite legitimately face with this software. Keep an eye on it, it may become rather interesting. Chris _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
