12 Nov
2002
12 Nov
'02
4:28 p.m.
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