a "Paul Mahol", in 2012. Don' know if that's mycroft, though.

This entire discussion is surreal.

It is a major boon to any format to have two independent implementations, especially of the decoder. Having at least a mostly-working proof-of-concept second decoder implementation is often seen as a must before any kind of real adoption of a format.

Attempting to write a second implementation of an existing format is not theft, it is not harassment, it is not abuse, it is not rude, it is not illegal, it is simply a reasonable technical goal for someone to set themselves.

There's no legal, moral, or even "social convention-al" reason why someone writing a second implementation would be required to prostrate themselves at the feet of the writer of the original implementation, contacting them repeatedly over the course of years to humbly beg for their pontifical blessing.

Some kind of contact could be nice, to cultivate a sense of community, but not required. Sounds like mycroft made some kind of attempt at one point many years ago.

Almost all of us rely daily on things that would not exist without reverse engineering. If you've ever run DOS or Windows on something that wasn't an IBM PC actually sold by IBM Corporation, you were only able to do so because people reverse engineered the PC BIOS. If you've ever opened a Microsoft .DOC in any program other than MS Word, or any other word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation file in any program besides the originator of the format, that worked due to reverse engineering. If you've ever used shared files on a network drive, at least one machine in the network was running Windows, and at least one wasn't, you almost certainly relied on the years of reverse engineering of the SMB protocol done by the SAMBA team.

None of those groups obtained permission from the originators before working on their clean-room implementations.

If it weren't for people who reverse engineer relatively obscure media and document formats, a lot of content from the last seventy years would simply be lost.

I appreciate TBeck's achievements. I understand he is going through a hard time and has legitimate fears about people abusing leaked versions of his copyrighted code. That doesn't seem like a sufficient reason for the histrionics on display here. Jeano and Porcus, I'm going to call you in particular out for unreasonable reactions here as well.

For all I know, it's possible that mycroft doesn't have the promised working implementation and was merely trolling, or that he does have one and it's illegally based on leaked code, or that there's some other reason this would never be the boon one would hope for from a second implementation.

But the only thing there's any actual evidence of in this thread is this: someone came to HydrogenAudio with what he thought was good news about something he had to offer, immediately faced all kinds of unreasonable accusations about driving the poor author of TAK to suicide by his awful, horrible, inhuman, inexcusable deed of trying to write a piece of interoperable software, understandably got upset at the reaction he was getting, wrote a couple bad replies, and has decided that HydrogenAudio is a hostile community he should not contribute to.

This is not a moment for anyone here to be proud of.

TAK has one thing no other lossless codecs have - best efficiency. It's irrelevant as in obscurity that only a tiny community uses it. That also makes comparison to widespread, de-facto standard Word/DOC or MP3 pointless.

In the meantime the moderators removed some of Mycroft's posts. The whole discussion got at one point heated up and then we reacted. Because these posts now are gone you and others are not able to get/to see the whole picture (unfortunately).

Also wishes that circle jerk around TAK remain obscure as it really is and should be always just that - circle jerk.

Thanks for Thomas good feedback I will not release TAK encoder at all.

This entire discussion is surreal.

It is a major boon to any format to have two independent implementations, especially of the decoder. Having at least a mostly-working proof-of-concept second decoder implementation is often seen as a must before any kind of real adoption of a format.

Attempting to write a second implementation of an existing format is not theft, it is not harassment, it is not abuse, it is not rude, it is not illegal, it is simply a reasonable technical goal for someone to set themselves.

There's no legal, moral, or even "social convention-al" reason why someone writing a second implementation would be required to prostrate themselves at the feet of the writer of the original implementation, contacting them repeatedly over the course of years to humbly beg for their pontifical blessing.

Some kind of contact could be nice, to cultivate a sense of community, but not required. Sounds like mycroft made some kind of attempt at one point many years ago.

Almost all of us rely daily on things that would not exist without reverse engineering. If you've ever run DOS or Windows on something that wasn't an IBM PC actually sold by IBM Corporation, you were only able to do so because people reverse engineered the PC BIOS. If you've ever opened a Microsoft .DOC in any program other than MS Word, or any other word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation file in any program besides the originator of the format, that worked due to reverse engineering. If you've ever used shared files on a network drive, at least one machine in the network was running Windows, and at least one wasn't, you almost certainly relied on the years of reverse engineering of the SMB protocol done by the SAMBA team.

None of those groups obtained permission from the originators before working on their clean-room implementations.

If it weren't for people who reverse engineer relatively obscure media and document formats, a lot of content from the last seventy years would simply be lost.

I appreciate TBeck's achievements. I understand he is going through a hard time and has legitimate fears about people abusing leaked versions of his copyrighted code. That doesn't seem like a sufficient reason for the histrionics on display here. Jeano and Porcus, I'm going to call you in particular out for unreasonable reactions here as well.

For all I know, it's possible that mycroft doesn't have the promised working implementation and was merely trolling, or that he does have one and it's illegally based on leaked code, or that there's some other reason this would never be the boon one would hope for from a second implementation.

But the only thing there's any actual evidence of in this thread is this: someone came to HydrogenAudio with what he thought was good news about something he had to offer, immediately faced all kinds of unreasonable accusations about driving the poor author of TAK to suicide by his awful, horrible, inhuman, inexcusable deed of trying to write a piece of interoperable software, understandably got upset at the reaction he was getting, wrote a couple bad replies, and has decided that HydrogenAudio is a hostile community he should not contribute to.

This is not a moment for anyone here to be proud of.

Ironically, I had already planned to contact you later to ask for cooperation on the decoder for TAK 3.0. I am glad that you wrote a decoder for TAK 1/2 (even if I saw it differently many years ago...) and would not want to release V3.0 without an open source decoder being available. I wanted to at least provide you with the source code of the new elements as well as some test files.

I would be happy if this possibility would still exist.

You can send me decoder for 1.X version if you want. Real specifications are much better. So I do not need to reverse Pascal code.
Although it is just codec with FIR coefficients for LPC with custom entropy coder and decorrelation for stereo.

In this world at war, is always good to see the good in people.

So, honest question: why not release TAK as open-source/source-available?

Going back to a comment I made way, way earlier in the thread - none of us live forever. Most of us don't make great plans around that basic fact, so software tends to die with the author and is lost forever.

Unless there's a business component to all this that I'm missing (selling support contracts, etc), TAK is freeware, no? Going open-source/source-available makes it easier to get volunteers to assist with things like, porting to other platforms, adding features, and so forth.

No person is an island. If you want to go fast: go alone. If you wanna go far: go together.

Not that it's impossible to get assistance in a closed-source project. I'll put my money where my mouth is, and volunteer right now to help port TAK to Linux, regardless of license. It's just easier since somebody could find the code and send back fixes without you having to seek them out first.

Also it's not like going to an open-source model means you have to say, use Github or GitLab, provide an online git repo, issue tracking, and so forth. Could be as simple as uploading the source code alongside the binary releases on your existing website. Plenty of open-source projects operate that way.

So, just throwing that out there. Food for thought, hopefully.