Re: Towards a better license for Mutopia

[Bernd Warken]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 10:05:41PM +0000, Chris Sawer wrote:
> Bernd Warken wrote:
> > Then, why should I contribute to Mutopia?
> 
> Nobody's saying you have to. I'd be sad if you felt unable to 
> contribute to Mutopia just because of licensing problems, but I hope 
> these can eventually be resolved.

Licensing is crucial.  I think that Mutopia's main aim is to create
free music.  But free music must be protected to stay free.  If some
free music is robbed due to a bad license then you cannot access your
score files any longer, so the situation is worse than before editing.
Some days ago, John Sankey reported such a case to this list.  Isn't
that enough to be warned?

For me, the GNU FDL would be enough because I'm worrying about the
source file and the readable and printable output, but I do not worry
about recording and performing.  So if you allow for a combined
license consisting of FDL for radable output and something else for
audio (e.g. MutopiaBSD temporarily) that would be fine for me for now.
But the tagline has to be adapted.

> If you want to get some lawyers 
> together and create a copyleft license suitable for use with music, 
> then go ahead.  :-)

European lawyers do not have the experience needed for free licenses.
On the other hand, the FSF has a long fighting experience in this field
and has some first-rate lawyers at hand.  So could just use RMS's offer.
The FDL could be a starting point, only the audio part must be added.
> 
> > It shouldn't be too hard to make it a GNU project.
> 
> Why should we? I'm not a religious follower of copyleft/the GPL, and 
> would not be in favour of making Mutopia a GNU project, as apart from 
> anything else I think they'd make us copyleft everything. Don't get me 
> wrong - I don't mind people placing music on Mutopia under a suitable 
> copyleft license (if one is ever created), but I wouldn't like the 
> whole of Mutopia to go this way.

I see, there are some fears of being eaten by copyleft monsters.  This
is a fairly common prejudice in commercial environments.  Two things are
mixed up here.  One the one hand there are the GNU license schemes 
(copylefts), on the other hand there is the Free Software Foundation (FSF).  

Using a copyleft license does not take nor limit your freedom, it just
protects it.  The authors always has all rights reserved.  He must not
take up any connection with the FSF.

On the other hand, if you want to make your project a FSF project you
must hand down your rights to the FSF in order to profit from their 
broader developer range.

So I was not concise in asking for becoming a GNU project.  I should
better speak about making Mutopia compatible with the GNU licenses in
order to have a potentially better protection against theft.

Bernd Warken <address@hidden>