Hi Alex!
I don't mean to slight Ge, I'm not against commercial software
> development, closed source or not. I'm not comfortable with the way
> the iphone works, but I don't have to buy one.
>
>
Same here. I find it a very interesting device for it ratio between size and
the amount of sensors but other aspects like the lack of Linux support and
the price keep me from getting one,
> I think I read somewhere that the chuck runtime and language are part
> of smule, in which case the same applies to ChucK. It seems a bit
> like tivoisation by the back door. Patents come into it on a tangent
> because the iphone is full of them. In the US, the android o/s has
> multitouch disabled, because Apple have the US software patent on
> touching your computer in more than one place at the same time.
> Software patents may well come to Europe in the near future.
>
>
I agree that there are big dangers here. There may be patents in ChucK,
thanks to the physical modelling stuff in the STK. Those would hopefully be
held by Stanford University and not by Yamaha. I'm not so worried about
Stanford sueing Ge and we're probably too small for Yamaha to be bothered
with.
>
> Just in case I sound like I know what I'm talking about -- I know
> little about the ChucK or pd communities, copyright or patent law. It
> just so happened that this post about PTPd patents, and a comment
> about smule and the GPL on my blog, arrived at the same time, and
> touched a nerve. You're right though, there are separate issues I've
> bodged together here. I probably shouldn't have left posting here
> until the morning light...
>
>
No, that's ok. I replied late at night as well which would explain the
"nobody complains about Ge but me!" tone of my email :-).
If I can speculate; I think Smule would be using parts of ChucK. Using the
whole thing would be quite silly as that's a lot to port, not all of it is
very stable, and some of it was borrowed from other GPL projects. Seeing as
how most (all?) Smule members/employees come from a university background I
trust that they are very careful about what they "quote" and how. I
personally feel that Ge (and perry, Spencer, etc) should be able to sell
their own code to some people while also licensing it to others under the
GPL. This would mean that they would indeed need to be very careful with
what has been patched in the open version but then that is
their responsibility. For all we know they already did make the fork you
were talking about. It has been mentioned that ChucK (the language and VM)
should benefit in the future from the research done in the Smule context.
This is indeed a thin line to walk but I trust the people involved and trust
that they made the right choices there for the reasons in my last mail. If I
can speculate some more; back when Apple was releasing the iPhone they
talked about it running OSX. At first I was enthusiastic about that, naively
assuming that would mean getting BASH and perhaps Xcode. In the end this was
of course a bit of a marketing move. Why wouldn't Smule
slightly exaggerate the usage of ChucK to use their fame to get a bit more
attention for ChucK? In the light of what you wrote here that may not have
been the wisest thing to do and may need clarification now but I could
imagine that.
For now, as far as I know, I can patch ChucK and I could fork it if I'd
like, I could redistribute that code, with or without a binary attached to
it, etc. If something would have gone wrong that would be
Ge's responsibility but fortunately Ge is a responsible man. I do think this
is a important topic for debate and you were right to bring it up but I
don't think the sky is falling. For all we know this is a good thing and
we'll see some of the innovations made in the Smule context opened to the
FLOSS community.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Thu Jan 21 2010 - 16:52:51 GMT