Mike Oliphant wrote:
>
> On 9 Mar 1999, Kyle R. Rose wrote:
>
> > As I said yesterday, the library code should be distributed under a
> > non-viral license. That means LGPL at the very least
>
> This is precisely the kind of situation the LGPL is designed for. We can
> provide a .so and a .dll, both under the LGPL. Remember that this just
> applies to the interface code that we provide out of the goodness of our
> hearts. People who want a stand-alone, proprietary binary are welcome to
> implement the interface themselves.
I *really* don't think the LGPL will work for us.
I investigated it quite a bit for my mod_dav module. It would require
that people ship their code as open source or in a linkable form. I
seriously doubt people want to bother with shipping a linkable form so
that people can update the LGPL'd library and relink(!).
The library(ies) should be under a BSD-ish license to garner the widest
audience.
> What about trademarks, though? As far as I can tell, what Escient bought
> was the trademark CDDB. If we develop another protocol and give it an
> acronym, who controls the trademark? Has this been thought about in other
> projects (GTK, GNOME, KDE)?
As I've mentioned before, I'd vote for CDIN :-)
Trademarks are based on first commercial use. I doubt that Escient can
claim a valid trademark on CDDB since the term was used before their
first commercial use. This is how the trademark "Linux" was argued away
from that guy a couple years ago.
(in that case, they put up a reasonable argument that Linus should get
it, but I think it would have been just as arguable that it was not
trademark-able)
> > As for the data... well, arguably, the CDDB entries aren't Escient's
> > property anyway, as they don't own the copyrights to the album or song
> > titles.
>
> It would be *really* nice to know what the music publishing industry's
> take on this is. Does keeping track of disc title/artist/tracks fall under
> "fair use"? My worst nightmare is that the record industry can enforce
> "ownership" of this information and decides to get into bed with Escient
> to exploit it (leaving the rest of us with no alternative).
I believe it is "fair use" and under various compilation precedents that
we can pull that data from *anywhere* whether the supplier likes it or
not (Escient in this case).
Please see http://mailman.cdin.org/pipermail/cdin/1999-March/000004.html
for a few additional ramblings on this. I had a better post last night,
but it went into the bit bucket...
Cheers,
-g
-- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/