[Ardour-Users] what linux audio project do you miss?

[Simon Wise]

On 04/03/11 05:06, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> On 03/03/2011 08:15 PM, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 11:08 -0800, Kim Cascone wrote:
>>>> If you want to write a Free version of baudline
>>>
>>> baudline is free:
>>> http://www.baudline.com/download.html
>>>
>>
>> Baudline is *not* Free - from the page you linked to:
>>
>> * You are not allowed to distribute this software.
>> * You are not allowed to reverse engineer this software.
>
> this is interesting:
>
> "
> Purchase the GPL source code for the baudline signal analyzer. The
> source code is expensive and it is intended for qualified corporate or
> institutional buyers. Contact us for details.
> "
>
> looks like they're after a GPL buyout similar to blender, because they
> certainly realize that once someone has bought the GPL licensed code,
> they are entitled to redistribute it without further restrictions.


So it IS free .. as in beer .. at least for now, as a non-redistributable binary 
only. But since redistribution and reverse engineering are not allowed this 
could of course be changed in the future. That certainly is one way to interest 
potential buyers.

IF the source is really sold under GPL then those parts released would also 
become free as in FLOSS. Their intentions don't seem clear, probably they 
haven't decided themselves.

Of course it is possible to sell a body of existing code to an open source 
project if someone, or a group, want to pay to make it available as FLOSS. As 
mentioned above it has happened before. Many programmers are employed to write 
FLOSS code by companies or institutions that find it worthwhile to contribute to 
projects they use.


Simon