Thomas Jeppesen wrote:
Hi,
If I wanted to use PD to build an audio-engine for a game, how would the copyrights work if the game I was creating the engine for were commercial?
Also, and I know this is going to be sensitive to some people in this community, but lets have the discussion anyway, I don't like the idea about anybody being able to open the audio-engine that I have created for a commercial game, as easy as they would any PD-patch out there. And I'm sure the people I would be working for would hate the Idea. Is there an easy or ”normal” solution to locking a patch so it can't be opened by anybody?
the first idea that comes to my mind is by "binarizing" the pd-files (that is: make the files non-human readable); and write a small converter that will revert your changes before Pd parses the file. the simplest way would probably just add a constant offset to each character, does making the file not recognizable on first glance. more sophisticated solutions would involve encryption.
but then, what do you really want to protect?
I read a post from Andy Farnell on the sound design mailing list, that EA had created their own version of PD for Spore, is that the only way to go about it if you wanted to use PD in a commercial production?
creating your own version of Pd is probably the most simple way to achieve a "locked" version. another reason for this is probably to include all "external" objects into a single binary and strip all the objects not needed.
btw, "commercial" is not contradictory to "open source".
mfga,sdr IOhannes