Plugin foo_dsp_src violates copyright
Reply #20 – 2005-10-24 21:00:06
I know that licences and laws aren't about it, but i always feel the need to p*** when people begin to argue the wording of rules, instead of their meaning and intention. I despise it because in those cases the rules end up being abused and twisted. In this case (IMHO) the GPL's main purpose is to stop others from abusing the free availability of GPLed code("stealing" without giving back) as well as to ensure that anyone can see and modify the source at will. So to make it simple: to stop abuse. Almost all of foobar which matters for endusers is moved into plugins. Heck, even the UI is a plugin. And all those plugins are BSDed. The only reason why the CORE itself is not opensourced is because the author wants to keep control on the development of the application(i.e. discouraging forks, etc.) and possibly(though, i dont know this - its just speculation) because he doesn't trust opensource 100% (cases where opensourced code is stoeled and then sold, etc. happen daily). Thus, all "components" of foobar which are mainly interesting to the enduser are opensourced - its just that the author wants to keep in control of the project overally. This is not unfounded paranoia - attempts to abuse the project as a whole already happened. Thus, we have a player which overally plays the opensource game(almost everything is opensourced) and a component which uses opensource. In terms of intention and practice, i dont understand the reason for all this hairsplitting. The only flaw i notice is the lack of available source for the plugin in question. But concerning foobar itself, i think the author of the SRC code is currently practicing "friendly-fire".