If you look at this from Logitech point of view the license is really not that strange. To me there are two obvious reasons why Logitech developed Jive: 1. They like to earn money by selling new remote hardware 2. They like to earn money by selling new playback hardware (SqueezeBox/Transporter)
When Jive starts to support audio playback these two points can also be merged into a single point (since Jive then can act as a playback device) - They like to earn money by selling new hardware There is no interest what so ever for Logitech to make the Jive source code available for anyone else if it doesn't result in that they sell more hardware. Logitech doesn't earn any money on the Jive software, the money is earned on the indirect sells of hardware which Jive software results in. The exact same statements can also be made regarding the SqueezeCenter software. However, there is a huge difference between SqueezeCenter and Jive. Jive could pretty easy be compiled and usable on other devices, the result is that you could use third party hardware instead of the hardware provided by Logitech. In the SqueezeCenter case this is a lot harder, SqueezeCenter itself doesn't playback any sound, Logitech currently doesn't provide any own hardware for running SqueezeCenter. So a completely open source SqueezeCenter doesn't cause any risk of decreasing hardware sells, but a completely open source Jive probably would. IMO it's not that strange that Logitech themselves like to take the decision regarding which devices that should be able to run Jive. This also makes it possible for them to also earn money on third party hardware by licensing Jive to a third party. Dean has already said earlier in this thread that this is something that they might consider regarding the iPhone. I think we should still be happy that Jive has public source. This makes it possible for us in the community to affect and improve Jive in a completely other level than it would if Jive was closed source. It also makes it possible to run third party applets on the Jive remote. Even though the license currently even might indicate that those third party applets will be Logitech property, Dean has earlier said that this is not the intent with the license. I think it would be good if the license was modified to clarify that I'm allowed to write a third party Jive applet and provide it for usage with Jive and still at the same time also is allowed to provide parts of that code to a third party platform without Logitech permission. As I see it the current license doesn't allow this and that is the part that I'm really worried about as a third party developer. If I remember correctly this was also one of the issues someone brought up a few months ago in the earlier discussion. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page' (http://erland.homeip.net/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41672 _______________________________________________ jive mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jive
