[ Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller ] > > This code may only be used if you obtain a patent license yourself. > > This is true for any mp3 code depending on nation of operation, no > matter which source code license is used.
Yes, I know. > We do offer a free beer patent license for desktop distro's and end users > though. Yes, and I am grateful that you do it. I only wanted to warn authors of free software applications that they need to carefully check whether their applciation license if compatible with the free beer patent license. > There is nothing stopping using copyleft licenses to implement and > distribute patented formats. The only thing is that you have to use a > copyleft license which doesn't require you to do provide patent licenses to > everyone downstream. Thanks for explaining this more exactly. My point was that every license that aims to guarantee the free software rights for all downstream users is incompatible with the mp3 patent mess, which is how I interpret the term "copyleft". One of the practical implications is that the code cannot be used by applications using the GPL version of Qt. > We choose the MIT in this case simply cause we wanted to give people the > ultimate freedom to choose how to use this code. I think the MIT license is a great choice for this, even if I am among the developers who cannot make use of the code, working on GPL-licensed applications. Olaf -- Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/
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