On 3/27/07, adam armfield adamairmailed@yahoo.com wrote:

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Something I feel very strongly about though, are

there

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still 'licensing issues' with Csound or has it shaken off all it's encumberances and become a totally free OS codebase?

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i heard john ffitch (head csound bloke, and a professor at bath uni) do a talk a couple of years back, he said that after long discussions with mit, it is open source now, they did a total rewrite for the latest version i think, whether this means it's totally totally OS is of course another matter ;-)

It is LGPL - see below!

Full text at : https://www.bek.no/pipermail/csoundtekno/2003-May/001105.html

"CsndTek] The New MIT Public Csound License Dr. Richard Boulanger csoundtekno at plot.bek.no Fri, 9 May 2003 22:58:21 -0400

Dear Csounders,

[...]

Over the past year, the licence "issue" has occupied a lot of the time and energy of the core Csound Developers. In fact, we have lost some great talent because of their frustration with certain clauses. So, I decided to do something about it. I asked the key Csound developers (and the csound~ developer) to tell me how they were using Csound; how they wanted to use Csound; what problems they had with the 1986/1992 license; what the 1986/92 license prevented them from doing; and most importantly what specific wording or phrases they would like to see changed in the license that would allow them to do what they wanted. I collected, organized and elaborated on all this material plus added in excerpts from the Csound mailing list discussions over the years and prepared a report and request for Barry. "Can we meet and talk about the license?" "Can we meet with the MIT Lawyers and get them to clarify the license?"

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Before leaving the meeting, the MIT Lawyers authorized me to contact John ffitch and ask him to change the Public Csound License to GNU LGPL and to contact all the opcode contributers and encourage them to do the same.

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For now, take a look at the attachments. As of May 1, 2003, this IS the New Public Csound License. I hope that you will be happy with ALL the clarification, and ALL the freedom that it brings. My dream - that Csound support will be added to all the major commercial sequencing and recording programs, that Csound derived plug-ins and audio-units will spring up everywhere, that Csound instruments will compile as VST, DXI, and Audio Units! And that the core of Public Csound, the engine itself, will radically change so that it supports plug-in opcodes contributed by more and more of you. I think that you can legally do all of this and more now that Barry Vercoe and the Licensing office of MIT have set Csound "free" under the LGPL.

Dr. B."