Re: [fluid-dev] Another application using FluidSynth announced

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Tuesday 13 September 2011, you wrote:
> it just takes one of all copyright 
> holders to raise a complaint to bring the app down. That includes all 
> copyright holders in the past which we know nothing about.
> 
> This actually comes down to another question. Does the project need to 
> protect itself from that scenario? If so, we need to relicense 
> FluidSynth, e g under BSD or under GPL with Classpath exception. That is 
> done by asking the contributors we can get hold of to relicense, and 
> rewriting the code for people that refuse or that we can't get in 
> contact with.
> 
> So which is worse? Relicensing and rewriting parts of FluidSynth, or 
> denying FluidSynth for iPhone/iPad users?
> 
> If you ask me, I will personally not commit to doing the job of 
> contacting copyright holders and ripping out code that does not fulfil 
> the new decided license. I will, however, prefer to relicense my own 
> contributions if the option is to have my own code ripped out.

Just my last opinion about this matter. I find it disgusting the attitude of 
Rusty Russell regarding the Wesnoth game. I can understand his disagreement 
against selling the game in the App Store, but what bugs me a lot is the 
arrogance of thinking that his license interpretation is the only valid 
against the rest of the project. And he even recognizes, and even is proud, 
that his attitude is pure selfishness. He could at least send a patch with the 
removal request, to not force others to give away his time fulfilling the 
unproductive task of searching and removing his contributions from the project 
(not sure if it was finally done, just a guess).

And looks like there may be a similar risk over FluidSynth as well. I would 
prefer to have sorted this matter now. So, anybody wants his code to be 
removed, if FluidSynth is used in applications published in the Apple store?

Regards,
Pedro