(Hi PIKA support, I'm the lead developer of MPD. I'm Cc'ing you this email as a first "official" contact. We're glad your company chose to add MPD to your product. Please read the following explanation or forward it to your law department. http://www.gpl-violations.org/faq/vendor-faq.html is a good read.)
Hi, yesterday, PIKA Technologies Inc. (located in the USA, CA) announced that they were using MPD on their appliance: http://www.musicpd.org/forum/index.php?topic=1761.0 So far, this sounds like good news - another distributor picking up MPD. They published a patch for MPD which adds a new audio output. This patch depends on two proprietary libraries. It looks like those two libraries (libpikahmpapi and libpikalcdapi) are covered by a non-free license called "PIKA MonteCarlo Software License Agreement": "Subject to this License Agreement, PIKA grants to you a personal, nonexclusive, non-transferable license to install and use the Software Products strictly for your own internal business purposes." (http://svn.pikatech.com/pads/distro/tags/1.0.0.236/LICENSE) The source code seems to be not available. While linking MPD with non-free code is allowed, the GPL does not allow distributing this binary or even the source code. According to copyright law, you may only distribute software if the copyright holder allows you to do so - most MPD users and distributors get this accreditation from the GPL. The GPL however is not applicable here, since there is non-free code involved, making PIKA's work a copyright violation. They violate the copyright of every single person who has ever contributed a patch to MPD (Warren, Eric, Alexander, me, and all the others). To be able to ship MPD with proprietary code, they would have to ask _every_ _single_ contributor. Many companies aren't aware of copyright law, they think they can just take open source as if it had no copyright. This even affects companies who should know better, whose only product is so-called "intellectual property". I will try to resolve this issue, and I hope PIKA will open up the two proprietary libraries. They showed their committment to open source by publishing patches in the first place, which is a good sign. Although the new audio output may have little value for us, it would be a good sign that we honor each other's rights. Max ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Musicpd-dev-team mailing list Musicpd-dev-team@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/musicpd-dev-team
