erland;350133 Wrote: > Basically you can do any modifications you like for your personal use > but you can't redistribute them beside sending them privately to > Logitech for inclusion in a future release.
And if Logitech asks you for your modifications, you must hand them over, and grant Logitech a broad range of intellectual property rights to your personal changes, including license to sell your work to others. > The main limitation with this in my opinion is: > - You can't port SqueezePlay to third party hardware and redistribute > it without permissions from Logitech. This kind of make sense since > Logitech really only earn money on the hardware, so it isn't strange > that they like to avoid competitors making money on their free > software. > > ... > > When you think about it, the licensing is pretty logical. Logitech *could* modify the license to allow public discourse & code sharing while disallowing binary distribution for non-Logitech hardware and distribution of source code changes & derivatives designed to allow the software to run on non-Logitech hardware. I don't know why they don't do that, as it'd give them plenty of leverage against both corporate hardware competitors and hobbyist leaching (unwanted iPhone, iPod Touch, and Windows Mobile ports). I imagine they may see this as a support issue -- they may fear taking support requests from customers running 3rd-party Controller firmware, and have decided that a slower, more expensive development process for the Controller is worth the expected support savings of not having to first ask users if they're running the official firmware (and to deny support to those who aren't). I should note that Logitech has begun to publish more information on the applet APIs (for those who're content with the underlying software), and has even re-released some Lua sample applet code to the public domain! So they seem serious about wanting 3rd party applets, even as they maintain a tight grip on their core Lua code. > Most parts of SqueezeCenter is GPL but it can't be used with third party > hardware players anyway so there is no reason to restricting the > license. SqueezePlay would be possible to use with third party hardware > similar to Controller, so restricting the license makes sense from a > business point of view. SqueezeCenter is very usable with non-Logitech hardware. For more than a year, I used a Hauppauge video client that I bought new for $40 USD to play my music thanks to Slimp3 emulation software. Roku used to advertise SlimServer support as a feature of their networked music players. It'll be interesting to see if projects like Moose and iPeng will make common devices like the iPod Touch and iPhone/Windows Mobile/Android handsets viable challengers to the Controller. I think there's a real risk that the SqueezePlay license will stifle Controller improvements and make those other devices more attractive to carry, costing them some sales. I personally carry a wifi-equipped PDA around most of the time, but still reach for the Controller because it's so much easier to use. If there were a really nice interface for my PDA, I might never use my Controller. -Peter -- peterw http://www.tux.org/~peterw/ free plugins: http://www.tux.org/~peterw/#slim AllQuiet BlankSaver ContextMenu FuzzyTime KitchenTimer PlayLog PowerCenter/BottleRocket SaverSwitcher SettingsManager SleepFade StatusFirst SyncOptions VolumeLock ------------------------------------------------------------------------ peterw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2107 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53757 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
