[ot] Fw: Barry Vercoe's Letter to the Csound Community - Pd-list

10 May 2003


      Hi,
Thought some of you might be interested in this.
Regards,
Chris.
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 23:08:57 -0400
From: "Dr. Richard Boulanger" rboulanger@berklee.edu
To: Csound Dev csound-dev@ella.mills.edu, Csound Tekno
csoundtekno@plot.bek.no, Csound List csound@lists.bath.ac.uk Cc:
maxlist max-msp@cycling74.com Subject: [CsndTek] Barry Vercoe's
Letter to the Csound Community
Dear Csounders, (and csound~'s),
Here is the letter that Barry Vercoe sent me last night and asked
me to send along to you regarding his recent decision to
change the License of Public Csound to the GNU-LGPL.
=======
Dear all
Each time I have developed a major system for Musical Sound Synthesis
I have tried to make the sources freely available to the musical 
community.
With MUSIC 360 in 1968 that meant running to the Post Office every day
to mail off a bulky 300 ft reel of 9-track digital tape, but I really 
did enjoy
the many hundreds of pieces this caused during the late 60's and 70's.
With my MUSIC -11 for the ubiquitous and less costly PDP-11, I chose
to pass the maintenance and distribution task off to a third party. 
This was
easier on me, and led to even more pieces in the community during the
late 70's and early 80's.
At the time I wrote Csound in 1985 the net had now made it possible
for would-be users to simply copy the sources from my MIT site, so I
put my time into writing a Makefile that would compile those sources
along with the
sound analysis programs and the Scot and Cscore utilities.  And though
this
was initially Unix, I worked with others to port it to Apple machines 
as well.
After I was awarded an NSF grant in 1986, it became necessary to add a
copyright and permission paragraph to the sources and the accompanying
Manual.  The spirit of my contribution however remained unchanged,
that I
wished all who would use it, extend it, and do creative things with it
be given
ready access with minimal hassle.
Today the original wording of the permission no longer conveys that 
spirit,
and the dozens of developers to whom I paid tribute in my Foreword to
Rick Boulanger's The Csound Book have felt it a deterrent to making
the best extensions they can.  So with the graceful consent of MIT's 
Technology
Licensing Office, I am declaring my part of Public Csound to be Open 
Source,
as defined by the LGPL standard.  This does not compromise the work of
others, nor does it make the whole of Public Csound into Free
Software. But it does create a more realistic basis upon which others
can build their
own brand of Csound extensions, in the spirit of my efforts over the 
years.
I am indebted to John ffitch to have protected me from the enormous
task of daily maintenance in recent years.  His spirit is even greater
than mine,
and I trust you will continue to accord him that recognition as you go
forward.
Sincerely
Barry Vercoe

__  +  Dr. Richard Boulanger, Professor

Music Synthesis Department, Berklee College of Music
1140 Boylston Street  - Boston, MA  02215-3693
Office Phone: (617) 747-2485   Office Fax: (617) 747-2564
eMail: rboulanger@csounds.com  or  rboulanger@berklee.edu
WebPage: http://csounds.com/boulanger/


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chris@mccormick.cx
http://www.mccormick.cx
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