[Stk] STK license clarification

Gary Scavone gary at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Wed May 9 07:15:54 PDT 2012


Hi Cristian,

The official STK license is listed online (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/stk/faq.html), as well as in the header of Stk.h and Stk.cpp.  This license is not restrictive.  The wording you are referring to is in the README for historical purposes ... it contains text that Perry included with his original distributions.  That said, I'll try to clear that up in the next release.

Regards,

--gary

On 2012-05-07, at 4:33 PM, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:

> 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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