The License of mpg123=====================	by Thomas Orgis <thomas@orgis.org>1. Story: The Odyssey, The Decision-----------------------------------This is the 17th of July in the year 2006, after half a year of preparation and the contributor email campaign running for over 3 months, I'm going to draw a conclusion about the licensing of mpg123 project.The license conditions of mpg123 have been subject to dispute and rejection by parts of the free software world in the past...We want to have it straight now.Michael doesn't have much freetime to maintain the code and bother with requests by companies wanting to use mpglib.So, he already decided to place mpglib under LGPL and mpg123 under GPL in the past.Now, after I applied for taking over maintainership we decided on placing as much code of the whole project as possible under LGPL to ease future code migration and merging between mpg123 and mpglib.That decision was followed by a lot of work to track down as many contributors to both Michael's development tree and my -thor one as possible to ask them for explicit LGPL support statements.I wrote to every Name/eMail address I could track down (including internet search for new addresses), regardless of the question if there indeed is some code left by that person.I asked them to utter any problem they may have with LGPL license as well as contacting me if there are _no_ issues.Of course, without having to ask again, supporters of LGPL are the initial author and the two current maintainers:	Michael Hipp	Nicholas J. Humfrey	Thomas OrgisAlso, new stuff was included with explicit LGPL permission from	Adrian Bacon	Romain Dolbeau	Guillaume OuttersPlus there is stuff pending with permission from	Zuxy MengNow for the folks having made suggestions and contributions over the years...In the first round starting in March 2006 I wrote the initial mail to anyone I could get. That resulted in some positive responses - examples:	"I don't remember what I did, but LGPL is fine by me."	"No problem for me."	"Any code I may have contributed to the mpg123 project at any time in thepast are hereby licensed to you under the GNU Lesser General Public"	"it's fine with me if mpg123 goes LGPL. 	However, my contribution to mpg123 was very minor, and I'm not even sure if 	any of my code is still in the current version."A good number of eMail addresses is just broken (years have passed...) and another good number of addresses are either totally unknown or not known to be good or bad since no response (not even bounce - thanks, spam!) came back in over 3 months.Some statistics for the first run: 86 total , 15 positive, 37 broken email, 34 unknownPositive:	Andreas Neuhaus	Chris Butler	Colin Watson	Daniel Kobras	Daniel O'Connor	Daniel Skarda	Erik B. Andersen	Helge Deller	Juergen Schoew	Martin Denn	Munechika SUMIKAWA	Oliver Fromme	Petr Stehlik	Robert Bihlmeyer	Samuel Audet	Shane Wegner	Stefan Bieschewski	Steven Schultz	Tillmann Steinbrecher	Tomas Oegren	Tommi VirtanenThen, an investigation of the code revealed a core of people having actually left traces in the code.Some more effort was put in tracking them down, with the partial success of having found some new, working email addresses and thus having some more positive responses .But also, it showed that the main number of people is not reachable anymore.Creators (of a whole file, driver...): 16 total, 5 positive, 2 broken email, 9 unknownPositive:	Andreas Neuhaus	Juergen Schoew	Oliver Fromme	Petr Stehlik	Samuel AudetModders: 7 total, 1 positive, 2 broken mail, 4 unknownPositive:	Tomas OegrenThat shows two things:	1. It's impossible to get a response from everyone having contributed in some way.	2. Everyone who I reached supports the license change to LGPLSo, for the sake of getting a reasonable step forward, I'm going to close the case.There are three categories of code:1. written by Michael or some other contributor who explicitly supports LGPL	Clear case: LGPL2. contributed years ago without license notice	The grounded assumption of can be made that the contributor accepted Michael's conditions, esp. the part about the software being available without cost.	Furthermore they gave the code into Michael's hands or placed patches in the internet without any claims concerning commercial uses - wich were not covered by the old COPYING file.	Based on the assumption of acceptance for the mpg123 COPYING file and the included rule of Michael's decision for any further use, this code is to be placed under LGPL by Michael's decision.3. contributed with notice	Some code includes a note about it being GPL. Well, one has to respect that.That results in the bulk of mpg123 being LGPL and possibly some parts GPL only.2. The Inventory----------------I will now examine the files of the mpg123 svn trunk as of 17.07.2006 with their respective legal status:Stuff added by current maintainers, thus being LGPL:	scripts/debugdef.pl	AUTHORS	autogen.sh	configure.ac	Makefile.am	MakeLegacy.sh	src/audio_jack.c	src/audio_libao.c	src/Makefile.am	src/audio_alsa09.c	src/config.h.legacy	src/debug.h	src/layer3.hNon-Code files from Michael, maintainers or just trivial content (safely LGPL, then):	BENCHMARKING	BUGS	CHANGES	equalize.dat	INSTALL	mpg123.1	COPYING	TODO	README	README.3DNOW	README.cfa	README.new	README.remote	README.thor	README.WIN32	test.pl	BENCHMARKING.thor	CONTACTsources under LGPLv2.1:by Michael:	audio.c	audio_dummy.c	audio.h	audio_hp.c	audio_oss.c	audio_sun.c	common.c	common.h	dct64.c	dct64_i386.c	decode_2to1.c	decode_4to1.c	decode.c	decode_i386.c	decode_ntom.c	Makefile.legacy	equalizer.c 	getbits.c	getbits.h	huffman.h	l2tables.h	layer1.c	layer2.c	layer3.c	mpg123.c	mpg123.h	readers.c	system.c	tabinit.c	term.c	term.hby contributors:	audio_aix.c: Juergen Schoew, Tomas Oegren, Niklas Edmundsson	audio_alib.c: Erwan Ducroquet	audio_esd.c: Eric B. Mitchell	audio_macosx.c: Guillaume Outters	audio_mint.c: Petr Stehlik	audio_nas.c: Martin Denn	audio_os2.c: Samuel Audet	audio_sgi.c: Thomas Woerner	audio_win32.c: Tony Million 	buffer.c: Oliver Fromme	buffer.h: Daniel Kobras / Oliver Fromme	control_generic.c: Andreas Neuhaus, Michael Hipp, Thomas Orgis	dct36_3dnow.s: Syuuhei Kashiyama	dct64_3dnow.s: Syuuhei Kashiyama	dct64_altivec.c: Romain Dolbeau	dct64_i486.c: Fabrice Bellard	decode_3dnow.s: Syuuhei Kashiyama	decode_i486.c: Fabrice Bellard	decode_i586_dither.s: Stefan Bieschewski, Adrian Bacon	decode_i586.s: Stefan Bieschewski	decode_MMX.s: higway	dct64_MMX.s: higway	tabinit_MMX.s: higway	equalizer_3dnow.s: KIMURA Takuhiro	genre.h: Shane Wegner	getcpuflags.s: KIMURA Takuhiro	getlopt.c: Oliver Fromme	getlopt.h: Oliver Fromme	httpget.c: Oliver Fromme	wav.c: Samuel Audet	xfermem.c: Oliver Fromme	xfermem.h: Oliver Fromme	Makefile.win32: Michael Hipp / Tony MillionGPLv2	audio_alsa.c: by Anders Semb Hermansen, Jaroslav Kysela, Ville SyrjalaTo be removed from distribution and thus not licensed in any special way:precompiled/tools/The mpglib source is not part of the core mpg123 distribution anymore - it's written by Michael, it's LGPL, it shall become a real library with own distribution and be married to mpg123 again.3. Conclusion-------------The decoder core Michael's work and under LGPL without question.Oliver Fromme is more of a co-author than "just" a project contributor, but he explicitly agreed to LGPL anyway.So, the core functionality is really safe without doubt.Contributors added mainly output drivers (perhaps coming from some freely available reference implementation) and CPU optimizations.Having explicit permission from a good deal of major contributors, the LGPL is quite comfortable here, too.I won't hide that there are explicit statements missing for MMX and 3DNow! optimizations (and the i486 opt, for that matter) due to unreachable authors.But I feel safe to make it LGPL there, too, because of the argument of them having given the code to Michael to incorporate it into mpg123 - without any own terms, implying that they agree to Michael's terms.There is one file left that carries an explicit GPL (_no_ LGPL) statement: the old alsa output. This file won't work on current Linux systems, anyway.Alsa is available through libao. There will probably be a new alsa output.So, even that one GPL exception may vanish in future, but I'll keep it for now as there may be someone who still has an alsa installation for that it works.For now that means mpg123 is LGPL with the exception of one file that is GPL only.End.