Banshee and Mono

Posted Feb 7, 2010 4:28 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Banshee and Mono by drag
Parent article: New GNOME Journal articles

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...