[LAU] the swinger

Chris Cannam cannam at all-day-breakfast.com
Wed Jun 2 20:37:41 UTC 2010


On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Niels Mayer <nielsmayer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Where http://isophonics.net/QMVampPlugins says "These plugins are
> provided in binary form only and may be used for any purpose, or
> redistributed for non-commercial purposes only." -- so I guess I'm
> good if the QmVampPlugin is provided as a "web service API"

Well, the implication is that that's OK if you're not making money from it.

> What is confusing is how come there are Linux distros that are
> distributing the QmVampPlugins in binary form? Are they "out of
> compliance" or do they have a special deal with http://qmul.ac.uk ?

No, there aren't any deals like that.  I don't know whether individual
distributions are in line with the terms or not, I suppose it depends
on whether they're non-commercial or not.  However, the terms did
change a few releases ago -- that non-commercial clause first appeared
at some point after 1.0 -- so it's possible some distributors might
not have spotted the change.

> Any chance you can convince your colleagues to outright open-source
> them

This question -- which is quite a common one for academic institutions
to face -- is not only down to the individual contributors but also
the institution, and it's partly a question of intent ("what else can
we do with this software?") and partly a practical one ("is there
anything in here we can't legally publish that way?")

Queen Mary university, like most publicly funded bodies, is pretty
open about its work with things like Sonic Visualiser under the GPL,
the Vamp SDK under a BSD licence, some open source plugins including
the rather interesting VamPy, and various other bits and bobs (see
http://isophonics.org for some more stuff we publish).  But there are
always tricky areas, and at the moment this is one of them.

It's a problem that we're going to be trying to make more explicit: we
are setting up an institute to try to help academic software
development become more open (you can read the initial blurb at
http://soundsoftware.org.uk/, it has neutral UK government funding,
I'm going to be working on it, and we will be hiring) and as part of
this initiative we need to try to work out answers for the sorts of
questions institutions (including QM) quite legitimately face with
this software.  Keep an eye on it, it may become rather interesting.


Chris


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