[linux-audio-dev] image problem

[Mark Knecht]

Taybin,
   Help me understand what libardour does exactly. It may not be the way the
code is arranged, but if I take the libardour database and break it into two
pieces, the audio stuff and the GUI, and I obey the GPL for that code, why
does something that I write that links to it have to be GPL'ed? My code is
my code. Paul's code is his. He's made the interface public. Does the GPL
license really say that if someone tries to talk to a piece of GPL'ed code
they have to make all of their work public also?

   I don't understand that part. It may be true, but I don't understand it.

   Going beyond that, since Company A wants to make money, the cost of
licensing libardour from Paul, et. all, would be another up front cost.

   We haven't covered the lack of MIDI yet, so remember that there are more
costs if these same sorts of ideas apply to that side.

   And the previous scenario was only for direct selling over the Internet,
probably. If Company A is going to make $500/copy, they have to sell it for
$1K retail, and there aren't too many viable options for doing that with a
software only product. (My opinion. I'd like to be proved wrong.)

   Yeah, $100K is standard priced stuff. I manage an engineering group in
India and can get support for $500-$1000/month, if you know how to manage
the project. ;-) (It ain't easy!)

Cheers,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-audio-dev-admin at music.columbia.edu
[mailto:linux-audio-dev-admin at music.columbia.edu]On Behalf Of Taybin
Rutkin
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:25 PM
To: linux-audio-dev at music.columbia.edu
Subject: RE: [linux-audio-dev] image problem


On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Mark Knecht wrote:

> Company A takes a copy of Ardour and forks it. They do their own GUI from
> scratch, maybe based on some product they already have running under OS-X
or
> Windows. Since the GUI is 100% theirs they don't put it under CVS. They
make
> improvements to the audio engine and provide those back for your
> consideration, but you don't like some of them so they don't all end up in
> the CVS tree for the main Ardour program. None the less, Company A  met
it's
> GPL requirements. (I think! If not, change whatever is required to make it
> so.) Let's assume this takes them 6 months to get ready to sell.

Okay.  Libardour is GPL.  So any frontend that links to it would have to
be GPLd too (IANAL).  This could, Paul willingly, be gotten around by
relicensing it from him.

66% or more of Ardour is in the GUI.  If they wrote their own GUI from
scratch, and did a proper job of it, I think that would be a strong
selling point over a freely available version.  But this all assumes that
Paul relicensed libardour to some company under a non open source license.

> Company A has just 3 software engineers on staff to do this. They earn
> $100K/Yr. each. (Lowish-end Silicon Valley prices) There is office space

Software engineers still make that much?  I thought it had dropped to the
$50-$60 range.

Taybin