This whole thing is shady as hell. You can't copyright a user interface. We've been through that already (see http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Copyright/copyright.html). You can copyright specific graphics, but Reborn only looks similar to that other program. In fact, there are explicit facilities for making Reborn look like whatever you want.
I'm guessing that Mr. Singer realized too late that using Gsynth code in Reborn would make it so he would have to open up the rest of the code, which he wanted to sell. Of course, he could open the source and still sell Reborn quite legally on a CD with a pile of mods and sample songs, and make probably as much money as he would if he kept the source closed, albeit not much either way. But he doesn't get it. Why else would he put "DO NOT SELL" stickers all over it's legal bits? So instead of giving out his precious code, which he is still obliged to do under the law, he's trying to back out of it all by claiming that lawyers are biting him. This will give him enough time to remove the Gsynth code and close the rest of the source. He pretty much admits this if you read between the lines of what he wrote on his web page. The old FAQ for Reborn was quite flippant about the whole open source thing as well. I'd be very interested to see what kind of email he got (if it actually exists) to make him drop the project like this. It so gets under my skin. If I was a Gsynth author, I'd be furious out of my mind right now. I do take comfort in the fact that Reborn was awful. The sliders didn't respond to mouse motion even nearly as well as the clunky 80's style Tcl/Tk interface in Pd. There was no MIDI control. The -p option was implemented incorrectly (of course). It didn't use ALSA or JACK. I crashed it twice in the hour I toyed with it. And any moron with half of one remaining ear could do a better 303 emulation given the Gsynth code. Feh. -- (jfm3 2838 BCBA 93BA 3058 ED95 A42C 37DB 66D1 B43C 9FD0)
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