Squeezeplay now under BSD License

[peterw]

It is with great pleasure that I am announcing that we've gained final approval for changing Squeezeplay to be licensed under BSD.

This is wonderful, fantastic news. It's not merely reassuring, it's a positively transcendent decision. For years Sean and Dean talked about relicensing some little applets, screensavers, and pieces of SqueezePlay under something like BSD to foster development. I am floored that Logitech has decided to relicense all the formerly-LPSL SqueezePlay code under the BSD license.

This is really, really tremendous news. Kudos to you, Andy, Michael, Matt, and everyone else who made this happen -- especially as the tone of late on the forums has tended to sound rather glum, cynical, and even a tad hostile. Way to go!

This is an excellent way to start the new year. I certainly hope to take advantage of the new license, and now no longer feel any reluctance about trying to contribute to SqueezePlay and (hopefully) earn a spot on the credits list.

Thank you again, and congratulations also to the new management for so obviously "getting it"!

-Peter

[putte_xvi]

Than why on earth do they void half of the booths from Asian mp3-player maker of any exhibits every year at IFA in Berlin on the grounds of "mp3 license infringement". Happened again last year. Big razzia.
You need a valid title for police to do that. One from the US will not be enough, needs to be a German one.

I wasn't aware of that. Perhaps the German courts have a different interpretation of the law than e.g. the Swedish courts? The patent office keeps granting software patents by using a loophole (patenting "a computer doing <algorithm>", thus making it a physical invention) and it's up to the courts to sort it out on a case-by-case basis.

Also, maybe the MP3 players implement parts of the algorithm in hardware? That would make it more difficult for the court to reject it as a pure software patent.

That was my point. AFAIK SP doesn't use lame but the Underbit codec:
http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/
Is this wrong?

Ah, you are right, it seems to include libmad. But the patents would be equally troublesome for all implementations of the codec. I brought up LAME as an example of how to solve this, by only distributing source. The potentially patent-infringing binaries can be provided by third parties in countries without software patents, such as Rarewares: http://rarewares.org/

Just to clarify something: Was the patent issue the only problem with distribution you were referring to?

Sorry for dragging the thread a bit off topic.

[pippin]

Patent and licensing.
I was more concerned about licensing.

That's why I suggested to break the code up into a proprietary (always to be provided by Logitech) and a BSD part (can be redistributed).

I'm having a second issue which is that it would be nice to be able to update the firmware (proprietary part) without losing changes I added myself but I thing the current applet installer can act as a workaround since it allows automatic re-installation.

[putte_xvi]

Leaving aside patents - I think some of the codec implementations are licensed from a commercial vendor (e.g. WMA, AAC) as they are well tuned probably with chunks of assembly.

The only thing I can find that looks like a WMA decoder in the Subversion source for Squeezeplay is decode_wma_win.c, and that's just a bunch of stubs. Are these prorietary bits included there somewhere, or only in the device firmware?

I was more concerned about licensing.

That's why I suggested to break the code up into a proprietary (always to be provided by Logitech) and a BSD part (can be redistributed).

Doesn't the Squeezeplay source as downloaded from the Subversion repository constitute this redistributable part?

Maybe I've misunderstood this whole thread. I can see how the firmware for the various devices could contain proprietary drivers and optimized codecs. If that's what you meant by "whole builds of SqueezePlay", redistribution would indeed be tricky. But the desktop version of Squeezeplay should be redistributable, right?

[andyg]

There is a bunch of non-public code that gets linked in as a library during our build process. This contains the AAC decoders, WMA decoder, Rhapsody decoder, wifi drivers, etc.

Also we recently had to move libmad out of the source tree for reasons I'm not completely clear about. We have a binary license but I'm not entirely sure what the status would be for someone else distributing a binary with libmad in it.

[arztde]

+1
Interesting discussion there. A lot of substance.

[freelsjd]

Let us look forward to many years of slimdevice/logitech products and open source software to drive these excellent devices.

[neely615]

First, I would like to thank Ben and the folks at Logitech for licensing out SqueezePlay. A couple of folks had already gotten it to compile under maemo, and therefore we are working on making it officially work for Maemo.
talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=332513&postcount=1

If you are interested, the project is up here
garage.maemo.org/projects/squeezeplay/

I am functioning as an admin, but will hand off duties to anyone else if they want it. Right now we need those binaries people have worked up. So just head on over to the garage if you are interested in developing, get over to the garage and join.

[dave77]

Hopefully we'll see a Symbian version too