LinuxSampler license, was Re: [linux-audio-dev] fst, VST 2.0, kontakt

[Dave Phillips]

Something from the source :

Christian Schoenebeck wrote on 9 Sept 2005:

"Anyway, about the mentioned commercial exception in general: you can assume 
all current tarball releases of LS (up to and including 0.3.3) to be under 
pure GPL. It was already released as pure GPL and is already included in many 
distributions as pure GPL software, so don't worry about that.

However we thought about changing the license in future to one which is more 
restrictive about commercial usage and we already placed those commercial 
exception notes just to be sure.

The idea about such a possible new license was to allow "direct" commercial 
usage of LS only if the commercial actor supported this or another 
(important) open source project either directly by contributing code or 
indirectly by funding the respective project. So somebody who supported e.g. 
the GCC, ALSA or Jack Audio Connection Kit project might also be allowed to 
use LS commercially. "Commercial usage" would of course only mean products 
based on LS, it would of course not mean using LS e.g. for commercial music 
production or something. Such a license wouldn't mean anything negative for 
the user, but might "motivate" or force ;) more people to contribute to this 
or another open source project, so personally I would find such a license 
more beneficial (than GPL for example) for the open source community in 
general.

Unfortunately I haven't found an existing open source license which would 
reflect those restrictions. Some even said this wouldn't be an open source 
license according to definitions of XY, but personally I think it would. So 
maybe we would have to write a new license, like a "Participation License" or 
something which might also be used by other projects in future of course.


Best,

dp