[Stk] Open Source and commercial usage

Cristian Morales Vega reddwarf at opensuse.org
Mon May 7 13:33:04 PDT 2012


https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=760936 (if it's not public
please tell me and will try to fix it)

The openSUSE legal team wrote this about the legal status of stk, for
inclusion in the distribution:

"The next issue is that the README for the package has the following paragraph
(starts at line 35) that seems to prohibit commercial usage (which would also
fall outside the Open Source Definition):

The Synthesis ToolKit is free for non-commercial use. The only
classes of the Synthesis ToolKit that are platform-dependent concern
sockets, threads, mutexes, and real-time audio and MIDI input and
output. The interface for MIDI input and the simple Tcl/Tk graphical
user interfaces (GUIs) provided is the same, so it's easy to
experiment in real time using either the GUIs or MIDI. The Synthesis
ToolKit can generate simultaneous SND (AU), WAV, AIFF, and MAT-file
output soundfile formats (as well as realtime sound output), so you
can view your results using one of a large variety of sound/signal
analysis tools already available (e.g. Snd, Cool Edit, Matlab).

The situation is confused by the paragraphs starting at line 125 (LEGAL AND
ETHICAL). The first one seems to reinforce the non-commercial statement made
previously ('and for free') whereas the next paragraph is a relatively
standard, liberal, open source license."

Could you please simplify the legal requirements to make it clear if
the software is "Open Source" (as the OSI defines it) or not?
Specifically you should be able to use it for whatever use you want,
even commercial, and you should be able to charge for it.



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