Stallman on Ogg Vorbis using permissive licence

Posted Sep 18, 2008 9:05 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: the licence is GPL, LGPL, MIT, and MPL by job
Parent article: Dirac 1.0.0 released.

Yup. Here's Stallman's quote:

I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use.

That quote is from 2001. I wonder would it actually be better, in these rare cases when a permissive licence is best, for the developers to *also* release under the GNU GPL so that the patent and DRM non-restriction promises are clear. Hmm.

Stallman on Ogg Vorbis using permissive licence

Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:24 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

That appears to be what they are doing with the schroedinger project -- it is released under both GPL and MIT. Not so with the dirac-research project, which is released only under reciprocal licences.

Now that job and coriordan have pointed out these strategic considerations, it seems like they probably chose to do it this way because of these strategic considerations: they want the schroedinger implementation to be re-used in proprietary products for better market penetration of the codec itself, while they want the dirac-research implementation to have enforced reciprocality so that new innovations have to be open.

Just a guess.