> 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.
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 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).
Mike