Hi Paul,

I'm sorry that you have been feeling frustrated dealing
with MIT.  We're real people here, though, and very interested
in helping you achieve your goals. 

>However, it appears from my attempts to contact Barry Vercoe (utterly
>useless), from an email exchange with Richard Boulanger and from
>discussions with Richard Stallman, author of the GPL, that I cannot
>distribute the existing Csound opcodes (modified or not) as part of a
>GPL-covered program. The license for Csound, coming from MIT,
>restricts source code use of Csound to "education and research".

You musn't feel slighted that Prof. Vercoe didn't respond to your
email -- he rarely responds to anyone's email.  I've been a student
with him for six years, and he never answers my email, either.

It is important to understand that neither Prof. Boulanger nor 
Richard Stallman can speak for the licensing issues around Csound.
(I am particularly mystified why you thought Mr. Stallman could).
Only Prof. Vercoe, in conjunction with the MIT Technology Office,
can do so -- thus, it's not necessarily a problem of different
views, as much as a lack of communication, that needs to be 
addressed.  

I feel sure that your views and those of Prof. Vercoe on the topic
of giving software away are substantially in line with each other.
He had already been releasing open-source software for years before 
doing so became such a political act as it is today.  

I saw from your previous email to CUD-list that you are planning a
trip to MIT.  If you will privately send me your itinerary, I will
try to get Prof. Vercoe to spend some time with you to discuss these
issues.  At least, I can spend some time with him myself to explain
the situation with the different forms of open-source licensing 
and the present difficulty with Csound -- I doubt that he's aware
of the intricacies that have developed over the past few years.


If you do plan to go forward with a clean-room reimplementation
effort, of course you are welcome to the code from my SAOL interpreter,
saolc, which is entirely released into the public domain by MIT.

Best,

 -- Eric