Re: [fluid-dev] Soundfont licensing (was: Research: Fluidsynth as internal samplerfor Denemo)

[josh]

Quoting David Henningsson <address@hidden>:
> S. Christian Collins skrev:
>
> > This thread reminds me: I would really like to release GeneralUser GS
> > under an open-source license (GPL, etc.).  Right now the license is just
> > one I made up, but I understand that prevents GeneralUser from being
> > included with open-source projects, so I would like to change that.
>
> I'm glad that you've come to that conclusion.
>
> > I am very new to the whole licensing thing.  Does anybody have any
> > recommendations for a good license to use?
>
> It depends on what you want people to be able to do with the SoundFont
> and not. I primarily have two suggestions, either BSD (free for all
> purposes), or GPL with a font exception, possibly modified (restricts
> people from doing several things with the SoundFont).


What about some of the creative commons licenses?  It always seems  
strange to me, for someone to use the GPL or BSD for non-software,  
since they were designed specifically for software.  I have seen  
several examples of this though, but it seems confusing.  For example,  
it seems the Fluid (R3) GM/GS SoundFont is licensed with the MIT  
license.

Maybe Attribution or Share Alike might suffice?  I'm not sure which of  
the CC licenses are accepted by Debian though.

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses


> > If there are future
> > contributers to GeneralUser, I would still like to be able to have the
> > final say in what changes make it in or not.


You could add additional clauses to whichever license you choose, such  
as that newer modified works should be given a new name or something  
like that.  Would that suffice?  Are you trying to prevent someone  
from distributing changed versions and calling it by the same name?   
Or are you wanting to receive credit for your work?  Most of the CC  
licenses require that public uses of the work is credited to the  
copyright holder.  I think the BSD and MIT licenses require that the  
copyright notice is distributed with the work as well, same with the  
GPL.


> > I also know that some of
> > the samples in GeneralUser are borrowed from the sample banks
> > Creative/E-MU has provided for free (shipping with the sound cards, or
> > on their website as free downloads), and while many other samples come
> > from free banks online, there is no way for me to be 100% sure that some
> > of them didn't come from copyrighted sources.  I don't know how this
> > plays into an open-source license.
>
> All sources are copyrighted one way or another. The question is under
> what license terms you're allowed to use the source. I suggest you read
> the license terms of the Creative/E-MU banks as well as any other free
> bank you remember having taken samples from, to make sure you don't
> violate those terms already.


It definitely would be a good idea to check the licenses of the  
originating samples.  This can often be a real pain.  I've thought  
about having per sample MD5 sums in the Resonance Instrument Database.  
 Once the database is fairly complete, in regards to free  
instruments, identical samples could be tracked between all  
SoundFonts.  This wouldn't cover the case where a sample is modified  
though, of course, but I'm sure it would be rather interesting, none  
the less!

Best regards,
Josh