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Topic: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD) (Read 8209 times) previous topic - next topic
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Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

According to the changelog, Monkey's Audio is licensed under 3-clause BSD starting with version 10.18, released the 10th August of 2023. This is the same kind of license FLAC and WavPack use.

Quote
Version 10.18 (August 10, 2023)

  •     Changed: Switched to the three clause BSD license to simplify inclusion of the source code.
  •     Changed: Renamed some macros from MAC_ to APE_ since APE is a little more widely used now.
  •     Changed: Updated to Visual Studio 17.7.0 (fixed code analysis warning about directories in the last builds).
  •     Changed: Updated the installer to NSIS 3.09.
  •     Changed: Updated to version 2.80 of the ALAC tool.

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Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #1 –
Cool. Hopefully Foss projects and linux distros will include it in main repo instead of  'non-free' / 3rd partys  ...

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #2 –
none-restrictive license is always a welcome.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #3 –
Monkey's on *n*x desktop is of course the intersection of two niche products (uh, within lossless audio file users, we are likely in ourselves only an intersection of two niches by now) - but a 10.x build would at least reduce the number of "different compatibility tiers": 3.99 base can not decode the newer high-resolution/multichannel extensions of the .ape format, and that could maybe be rectified - although it won't affect ffmpeg, which as of now sits in between and can decode some of the higher-resolution files.

A *n*x version is here on Github, based on the old Frank Klemm / SuperMMX 3.99 port. With some patches for shntools integration it says - I wonder if that is the piping support, which official Monkey's has gotten in the meantime.
No idea if the author is willing to update it. I'll leave to Monkey's users to take it on.


On a different note ... @TBeck and @ghido , who is next in the FOSSing line?  ;)

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #4 –
I do appreciate the author going with a better non-problematic licensing of his format.  I feel it's the right step in the right direction for this format and long overdue.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #5 –
If anyone wonders why the previous license was sometimes difficult to work with, there is an interesting mail on the debian-legal mailinglist here.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #6 –
This is very good. Until this year I assumed MA was still closed source, even then I didn't bother looking at it properly because of the license.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #7 –
I guess this was the only way to get out of the licensing mess. 
Actually, the license was changed in 2021, and also as recently as May. No way to find last month's license on the Wayback Machine, even. And I have a hunch that nobody would notice even if that license were OK - it takes a name you can recognize, to be assured that there are no evil restrictive licensing agreements.

That latter part of the sentence is actually a quote from the front page up to circa spring 2011. Quoting the December 2010 front page:
"there are no evil restrictive licensing agreements"
... "evil" ...  inevitably spawns the question, who thinks those are benign? After all the license did even lay claim to ideas you might have come up with from the source code. And that claim remained even when the "evil" was removed (but the claim of no restrictive licensing agreements remained).

Stating "3-clause BSD" on the front page wouldn't do any harm ... ? 

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #8 –
Monkeys Free Audio

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #9 –
The Free Monkey's audio.

In other less significant apenews and not-so-news, after a brief test:
* Now includes .bat files for drag and drop encoding / decoding. That wasn't there in 10.08, at least.
* Since a few(?) releases, it detects (and uses, I presume) more CPU optimizations.

10.08 also detected the following:

* Also (not-so-news), giving the outfilename "auto" will convert to original format - though, not original extension. A monkey'd filename.au becomes filename.ape and mac.exe filename.ape auto -d returns filename.snd
(If converted from other lossless formats/piped, it apparently outputs .wav)
* float isn't compressing good. No surprise, Ashland has already pointed that out.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #10 –
Thanks for this.

I added a license link to the latest build.  I also made the license one of the tabs on the webpage.

Cheers.

Re: Monkey's Audio 10.18 (licensing has changed to 3-clause BSD)

Reply #11 –
@MonkeysAudio , for clarification or confusion:
Are you also retro-relicensing old Monkeys under the ("new") 3-clause BSD? Asking because they float around, and I don't see any *n*xes using the new one.

Also relevant for *n*xes is what part of it actually compiles (the console, or more?) and for example whether it could drop-in replace the old shntool modification.