You know, we're not hiding anything, we're not making any commercial products that compete with anything licensed by these patent holders -- or with anything licensed by Steinberg, for that matter.

Therefore, I prefer to use this stuff out in the open where they can object if they want to. They know about it -- if they want to know about it, since all this is discussed publicly in well-known places. 

I repeat: we're not hiding anything, and they can object to it if they want to. I prefer to put the burden on them instead of on us. 

The fact that they have not objected may create a precedent of adverse possession, although of course I am not a lawyer.

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Anthony Kozar 
>Sent: Jul 9, 2007 3:36 PM
>To: New Csound Developer list 
>Subject: [Cs-dev] STK license and Sourceforge requirements
>
>>From the STK web site
>
>
>"Legal and Ethical Notes
>
>This software was designed and created to be made publicly available for
>free, primarily for academic purposes, so if you use it, pass it on with
>this documentation, and for free. If you make a million dollars with it,
>give us some. If you make compositions with it, put us in the program notes.
>
>Some of the concepts are covered by various patents, some known to us and
>likely others which are unknown. Many of the ones known to us are
>administered by the Stanford Office of Technology and Licensing. The good
>news is that large hunks of the techniques used here are public domain. To
>avoid subtle legal issues, we will not state what's freely useable here, but
>we will try to note within the various classes where certain things are
>likely to be protected by patents."
>
>------
>
>The STK documentation claims that it is an "open source" library but it does
>not meet fundamental aspects of the open source definition such as granting
>the right to charge a few for distribution.  Sourceforge requires that all
>software components that we distribute meet the requirements of the OSI open
>source definition:
>
>http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
>
>Therefore, my conclusion is that we should stop distributing the STK-wrapper
>opcodes in binary form and we should remove the source code from the Csound
>download page.  We could still supply the STK wrapper source file and allow
>users to build their own module, but it should not be on the Sourceforge
>site in binary form.
>
>Furthermore, the assertion of patent rights by Stanford over unknown
>portions of STK without the grant of any license to use those patests makes
>it extremely dangerous to use!  I think that the authors of STK and their
>respective universities should be taken to task over this.  They are
>academic researchers and institutions.  They should be promoting the free
>usage and expansion of the knowledge that they "create", not placing
>impediments on it.
>
>Anthony Kozar
>anthonykozar AT sbcglobal DOT net
>http://anthonykozar.net/
>
>
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I believe that I have an ethical obligation to respect the copyrights of
other individuals, otherwise I cannot expect them to respect mine.  This
entails respecting the licensing terms of other people's software whether I
like them or not.

And yet, I am feeling rather hypocritical just saying that since I am still
not sure whether it is OK for me to be including the MacOS 9 front end on
Sourceforge.  Looking at the source code, it seems to have been developed by
at least three or four different groups of people at different times and
institutions.  There is no copyright statement and no explicit licensing
information.  I asked about it here once, and Matt replied that there is no
license, but he didn't develop the entire program himself.  So, I have not
yet tracked down every contributor to that code base and asked for their
permissions.

Nor have I asked Bill Gardner for his permission to modify and redistribute
MIDI to Csound, or Dave Madole for his Mr. Tweaky program.  These programs
were available with sources but without copyright notices or licenses from
public FTP sites, and yet I cannot really assume that they are public
domain.

So, despite my concerns over conflicts in the (known) licenses of various
components of Csound, I will try to shut up now, lest I regret being too
critical of others when I myself am not perfect.

Anthony Kozar
anthonykozar AT sbcglobal DOT net
http://anthonykozar.net/


Michael Gogins wrote on 7/9/07 5:09 PM:

> You know, we're not hiding anything, we're not making any commercial products
> that compete with anything licensed by these patent holders -- or with
> anything licensed by Steinberg, for that matter.
> 
> Therefore, I prefer to use this stuff out in the open where they can object if
> they want to. They know about it -- if they want to know about it, since all
> this is discussed publicly in well-known places.
> 
> I repeat: we're not hiding anything, and they can object to it if they want
> to. I prefer to put the burden on them instead of on us.
> 
> The fact that they have not objected may create a precedent of adverse
> possession, although of course I am not a lawyer.


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Thanks Mike, I could not have said any of this any better myself.  And since
I realized that I was not on the firmest ground myself, I decided not to
pontificate ...

I agree that we should try to comply with all Sourceforge policies to the
best of our abilities, as I am personally very grateful for the services
that they are providing to us.  And while I think it is an extremely remote
possibility, we should also try to avoid any legal entanglements with
software licenses, since if someone does decide to sue, they will likely sue
everyone they possibly can (Sourceforge, the Csound development team, any
Linux distros including Csound, possibly even the institutions that we all
work for ...)

Anthony

Mike Coleman wrote on 7/10/07 10:06 AM:

> Since SourceForge is providing the hosting more-or-less for free, and
> in a fair way, taking reasonable steps to comply with their policy on
> this seems like a decent thing to do.
> 
> There are additional reasons for getting this straight that may not be
> apparent, too.  If this code makes it into Linux distributions and/or
> other pieces of software, and then is later subject to court action
> because it's being distributed (unwittingly) in an illegal way, this
> could cause a cascade of problems for a lot of other people that, like
> you guys, are basically just doing this for fun and maybe to make the
> world a little bit better, and who really have no resources with which
> to fight legal battles.  A stitch in time here may save many more than
> nine.
> 
> No one would be happier than me if the worlds of "for profit" and
> "non-profit/hobby/for-fun" could be separated so that the latter never
> had to think about the former.  Unfortunately, that's not the state of
> things, but a little advance preparation like this will go a long way
> towards keeping csound out of trouble.


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