Squeezeplay now under BSD License

[bklaas]

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

I'm checking in the changes to the files right now on the 7.4/trunk branch, and will pull them up the ladder to 7.5 following that.

This is a big victory for us, and want to thank Andy, Michael, our past leader Matt Cuson, as well as several others that didn't give up on pressing for this approval.

I want to emphasize that we have a long way to go in building/rebuilding our 3rd party development community, and I've been having some discussions offline with some of you on how to strengthen that. I'm also getting some positive indications (really) from our new management that they are indeed interested in not only embracing 3rd party development but to doing it right. To do this right will take time and effort, and that's not going to happen until Squeezebox Touch is on the market. So for now I'd like for all to be cautiously optimistic. And patient.

On this particular issue however, the BSD license for Squeezeplay, I pressed (and pressed and pressed) that it was a critical olive branch worth doing immediately, and I really feel it's cause for celebration that this finally got approved.

cheers,
#!/ben

[andynormancx]

Well done Ben, I really didn't think that would happen. So I for one see that as a very good sign.

[Mnyb]

+1
Congratulations, !

[bluegaspode]

Congratulations,

one small step for man, giant leap for ...

[epoch1970]

Bravo.

[ModelCitizen]

Rock n' Roll!

Well done Ben and the team. It is great to have some good news on this front.
Congratulations indeed!

[Muele]

I think this is good news, that should restore faith in the productline for many users.

[pippin]

This is a big victory for us, and want to thank Andy, Michael, our past leader Matt Cuson, as well as several others that didn't give up on pressing for this approval.

Congratulations. That's great news! And thanks to all of you for not giving up on this.

I'm also getting some positive indications (really) from our new management that they are indeed interested in not only embracing 3rd party development but to doing it right.

This is just as good news!

One more thing regarding the license:
I understand that there are parts of the code that you can't sub-license so it will still not be possible to redistribute whole builds of SqueezePlay.
For this reason: would it be possible to build SP, especially for the devices (Touch, Radio, Controller) in a way that you can distribute the "Core" with the 3rd party licenses separately from the higher level stuff that is purely Logitech (mainly the UI part)?
This would making distributing modified versions of SP much easier since you could distribute not only add-ons but also changed versions.

This especially applies to the firmware update process. It would be good to have a way to not overwrite changes in the higher level part when updating the low-level stuff.

I understand this is not something we'll see for 7.5.0.

[DigitalMitch]

Well Done

both to Logitech for seeing the light and Ben for perservering.

let's look forward to both the Touch and more collaboration afterwards.

[Siduhe]

+1 here. I suspect an awful lot of effort went into this behind the scenes, which is appreciated (even by those of us who don't develop but just try hard to break things at the beta stage).

[dave77]

To do this right will take time and effort, and that's not going to happen until Squeezebox Touch is on the market.

You make that sound so far away

[erland]

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 good news, definitely a big step in the right direction for Logitech.

I want to emphasize that we have a long way to go in building/rebuilding our 3rd party development community, and I've been having some discussions offline with some of you on how to strengthen that. I'm also getting some positive indications (really) from our new management that they are indeed interested in not only embracing 3rd party development but to doing it right. To do this right will take time and effort, and that's not going to happen until Squeezebox Touch is on the market.

And this is even better, really good news.
It's still a long way to go, but just going public with this indication is a big step in the right direction.

Time for celebration, let's make some applets...

[schiegl]

Indeed good news(*) ... (the license change & upcoming improved 3rd party development support). thanks to all who made it possible, SlimDevices aehm, Logitech deserves it!

kind regards,
Markus

(*)For me the best news in the last months...

[putte_xvi]

Distributing binaries

I understand that there are parts of the code that you can't sub-license so it will still not be possible to redistribute whole builds of SqueezePlay.

Which parts are those? I had a quick look at the third-party stuff included with the SqueezePlay source and it all seems distributable.

Freefont, libmad and freetype are licensed under the GPL, all SDL-related things use the LGPL, the Xiph.org codecs use the BSD license, zlib123 and libpng use the zlib license (which is a free software license), PortAudio and most Lua-related packages use the MIT license, and the remaining (InnoSetup, tolua++, libjpeg and luamd5) all have licenses that permit modification and distribution.

So unless "BSD license for Squeezeplay" means "BSD license for some parts of Squeezeplay", both the Logitech code and the third-party code should be possible to distribute.

Or are you talking patent licenses? That shouldn't be a problem in Europe at least, as all software patents are luckily still invalid.

[tcutting]

This is good news, definitely a big step in the right direction for Logitech.


And this is even better, really good news.
It's still a long way to go, but just going public with this indication is a big step in the right direction.

Time for celebration, let's make some applets...

Does this imply some new applets from erland?