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Re: Voice over IP.
From: |
Leigh Smith |
Subject: |
Re: Voice over IP. |
Date: |
Wed, 13 Oct 2004 14:05:08 -0400 |
You mean, the possible licensing problems are with MusicKit, not
SndKit ?
Short answer: Yes, MusicKit only, SndKit has no licensing issues.
Long answer: NeXT released two frameworks, the SoundKit and the
MusicKit. It's unclear which parts of the MusicKit NeXT developed prior
to donating it to CCRMA @ Stanford university. All work of CCRMA was
released with a very open license and unfortunately CCRMA forgot to
mention to the public that their agreement with NeXT had an expiration
date. Since everyone forgot the agreement, the expiration date passed,
in which case NeXT (now Apple) still holds ownership of the undefinable
portion of the MusicKit which they released to Stanford, however all
changes since circa 1990 are not owned by Apple. I've attempted to
track back through old releases from CCRMA with their help, but there
is still a years worth of development that can't be accounted for.
Apple certainly haven't been threatening to stop use of the code base.
In discussion with Julius Smith of CCRMA, myself and some Apple
attorneys the suggestion was made that the code would be acceptable to
be used in applications which were open source, but closed source
applications could only be released on Apple hardware. This was a
proposal that is yet to be formally ratified.
The SndKit however was a clean room implementation by Stephen Brandon
of Glasgow University implementing the published SoundKit API. It has
been substantially improved in it's design (i.e. many new classes to
handle sound streaming i.e SndStreamClient, and audio processing i.e.
SndAudioProcessorReverb) by Skot McDonald and more recently by myself.
This uses no part of the MusicKit as authored by Apple to do it's job
and can stand alone.
Apple did indeed then release the SoundKit as part of the first Darwin
release but it came just after Stephen completed the first SndKit
release and apart from some SndMeter code which is in the SndKit
distribution as a pending reference implementation but does not compile
or is used, the SoundKit is not used or part of the SndKit.
The solution to the MusicKit legal issue in my opinion is to continue
to develop on the code base since there are many parts which need
complete rewrites (the synthesis stuff still uses 56K DSP assembly!) or
can do with substantial updates (MKConductor). I am pursuing that goal
so that we arrive with a MusicKit codebase that doesn't have any
license issue. That said, the codebase with the exception of the
MKSynthPatch synthesis portion is quite usable now.
I've been swamped with work so I haven't had a chance to get much of
this info out to the MusicKit web site, but you're hearing it from the
horse's arse^X^X^X^Xmouth yourselves, folks...
BTW, the CVS repository is substantially newer than the last 5.4.X
release. Another thing I need to do...
--
Leigh M. Smith
mailto:leigh@leighsmith.com
http://www.leighsmith.com