Hi Ben, > This sort of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I can't really > explain why.
Perhaps I can reexpress why we think this is a good idea. New Mixxx users often either don't have their library set up correctly, need to wait a long time to scan it, or don't have music that's terribly dj friendly, perhaps a lot of their music is still on cds and they need to rip it before they can play it in Mixxx. Providing a few tracks with Mixxx allows them to get started straight away. It's also free good music from artists you may not have heard of. Overall I think this is a nice addition for users. Artists, especially less established ones, have trouble getting people to listen to their music, even if it's good. So by putting their music in Mixxx you're helping to promote new artists who are making music that djs are interested in. Also many of the artists have record labels who are willing to pay for the service, which then supports Mixxx development, so it's good for Mixxx in a more direct sense too. So let me address your technical points as well: > However on a purely practical level, won't it mean you are including > something with mixxx which users do NOT have the right to distribute > under the GPL? Yes. Although I should point out that for example, we already distribute the non-free ASIO dll with our Windows builds which required Mixxx to sign a license agreement with Steinberg. What the GPL means and always has meant for Mixxx is that any user has the right to modify and redistribute the Mixxx part, the part that we created as a community. The promo tracks feature doesn't change this. In fact it's perfectly fine for a user to rebrand Mixxx as "My DJ App", load it with your own promo tracks and ship it to users for your own promotional purposes. >From a practical packaging point of view, the packages are built without the tracks by default, they won't go in our bzr, so they have to be added by hand, anyone building from source for another distro will have no additional work the way things are set up now. Hope that helps explain things. Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Mixxx-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
