Banshee and Mono [LWN.net]

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 0:19 UTC (Sun) by eparis123 (guest, #59739)
Parent article: New GNOME Journal articles

Sometimes I felt that Banshee (and a filesystem indexing program I don't remember its name) was a trojan horse to initially inject Monoin the Gnome platform.

I don't know why Rhythmbox wasn't extended instead, but maybe there were valid technical reasons.

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Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 4:24 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (12 responses)

Licensing.

Rhythmbox licensing made it difficult to ship legal open source mp3 codecs bundled. That is codecs that are open source and had their patent licensing paid for. (the Fluendo MIT licensed codecs) So companies that desired to ship legal mp3 playback couldn't really use Rhythmbox. Banshee seems to me to be a improvement over what was previously used, which was the open source version of RealPlayer (which for the type of application it is is quite nice), which couldn't use the Fluendo/Gstreamer stuff anyways.

That and probably a desire to prove that Mono can be used to make viable Gnome applications. Back when it was started Mono was very new and you generally need some applications developed in order to test out the new framework in practical environment. And for promotional purposes. Banshee is actually quite nice.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 4:28 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (8 responses)

What exactly is the licensing issue? Can you provide a reference?

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 4:42 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

Rhythmbox is licensed GPL.

The codecs are copyright licensed MIT, but have additional restrictions placed on them due to the patent license... meaning it is legal for you to play around with the code, but you may not redistribute it. The only legal sources for these codecs is either bundled via Novell or a no-cost download from Fluendo.

This sort of additional restriction on redistribution is expressly forbidden by the GPL. Meanwhile Banshee, like the codecs, are licensed under MIT and thus do not have the requirements to maintain freedoms for end users.

I think that this is the core of the issue.

If I find a historical link to this then I'll post it. I'm going from memory right now.

There may have been a desire later on to support some sort of DRM, but since DRM is effectively dead now when it comes to music then that part of things is mostly a non-issue.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 5:48 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Rhythmbox is not plain GPL but GPL with exceptions specifically to avoid
this problem as seen in the footer of

http://projects.gnome.org/rhythmbox/

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 11:53 UTC (Sun) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] (3 responses)

That exception wasn't always there, the relicensing happened maybe two years ago.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 13:09 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure but it is way past time for licensing to be considered a disadvantage
for Rhythmbox

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 14:38 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Who said it was a disadvantage still?
I was just stating one of the reasons why Banshee was created by the Novell
folks, originally.

I am sure there are other resaons, too. Banshee is not the only media player
to be created since Rhythmbox was created. Exaile, for example.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 14:59 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I never claimed you said that but it is important to point out that the
reason is not valid anymore and the effort require to license was much less
than the effort require to create another from scratch

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 19:13 UTC (Sun) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (1 responses)

I would like if you could actually provid a quote from some of the banshee authors.... What you write
is just unsubstantiated... and the licensing is not a problem today.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 20:22 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

alright.

Remember that all of this is from 2004-2005 and that was a long long time ago
in the internet era. People are not good at preserving their blogs and other
things that would help document what I was saying.

The best I can do right now is:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Dec-24.html

And a Rhythmbox developer thread on their mailing list talking about doing a
relicensing. (which has happened, apparently,)
http://www.mail-archive.com/rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org/msg...

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 15:42 UTC (Sun) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

How does that apply when both Rhythmbox and Banshee use GStreamer to play media?

It seems to me it would be a problem with the GStreamer license if any.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 16:58 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Gstreamer is LGPL which is designed to allow this sort of usage.

I figure that in order to be safe from stepping on anybody's toes it is
important to be able to satisfy the licensing of all software that you have
shipping as a single product.

A plugin mechanism provides some level of abstraction, but I guess it is not
enough to prevent creating a derivative product by combining two otherwise
separate pieces of software. "Derivative" as used by a legal term to indicate
were your responsibilities for copyrights end and begin.

This sort of thing is why we have lawyers, I suppose.

Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 18:50 UTC (Sun) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

Actually, Banshee exists because even GPL + exception for GStreamer plugins wouldn't have
allowed SUSE to ship it with a Helix backend (which they did to get MP3 playback and encoders
from Real). That, and possibly showing that Mono is a viable platform...