Re: Voice over IP.

[Leigh Smith]

> 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