[LAU] licensing fun, was Re: Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 7:29 AM, James Stone <jamesmstone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The licenses for Eisenkraut and FScape (both under the GPL) are
>> restricted in similar fashion to LinuxSampler :
>>
>> "please note that you are /not allowed/ to use this software if you are
>> a member of a military or pharmaceutical or governmental institution
>> (excluding public service in general and civil science/education). if
>> you have sympathies for bad governments (applies to most countries), you
>> should also opt to /not use/ this software. thank you."
>>
>
> I think this statement is not part of the license (the page says the
> program is licensed under GPL). IIRC, zynaddsubfx used to have a
> similarly non-free statement about not using the program to write
> music "against God" (such as heavy metal).. (I'm not sure Christian
> heavy metal bands would agree with this but... whatever!). I think it
> was discussed briefly on this forum and people concluded that this was
> merely the authors wish, and was not part of the legally binding
> license.. now whether that is legally OK I don't know. LS takes a
> different approach and tries to integrate their wish more closely into
> the license documentation, saying GPL applies apart from for
> commercial implementations - in commercial software and hardware.. So
> although it is shades of grey, this is seen as non-free whereas the
> others are seen as free (although the others are vastly more
> unreasonable in my opinion)..
>
> What I don't quite understand is that Qt has a free/commercial
> separate licensing, but no-one has the same kind of problem with qt
> that they have with LS? Would someone care to explain?
>
> James

James,
   1) qt understands that it's used for commercial as well as
non-commercial software and specifically 'allows' for this in the
license. This allows for free and fair competition in the marketplace
by any user that chooses to obey to terms of the license. Some people
use it, others don't for this reason. However since it's qt's license
which is legally defendable we live by those terms whether we like the
terms or not.

   2) Newer versions of Linux Sampler understand that it could be used
to develop commercial programs and specifically attempts to 'disallow'
this by modifying a license that *specifically* disallows modification
of the license in the first place. This is likely not defendable
legally so possibly the current LS source is completely free as it's
been released without a legal license. Anyway, they approached the
problem from the wrong direction. They should have written their own
license but they didn't.

Just my 2 cents,
Mark