Speex dev - Sep 2007 - Speex on DSPic, violation of license?

I was browsing through Microchips' website and came upon their Speex 
library. They are charging for it and looks like it is also not open 
source.

http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2005/6/embedded18391.html

scroll down to the paragraph about pricing.

- farhan

farhan@phonestack.com wrote:
> I was browsing through Microchips' website and came upon their Speex
> library. They are charging for it and looks like it is also not open
> source.
> http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2005/6/embedded18391.html
> scroll down to the paragraph about pricing.
I'm aware of Microchip's closed-source port of Speex to the dsPIC. As
far as I know (haven't checked the details), this is perfectly legal,
even though I think it's a dumb decision for a company that's in the
business of selling chips. I say it's dumb because by not contributing
the changes back, they ended up not benefiting from significant
improvements I made to Speex since their forked. Had they done so, the
memory requirement for Speex on dsPIC would be smaller than what they
have now and the quality would likely be better. In case there are any
dsPIC developers around, you should know that the current Speex svn/git
version (or 1.2beta2) now has small enough RAM requirement to fit on the
dsPIC, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to create an open-source port
that's actually better (and of course cheaper) than what Microchip sells.

	Jean-Marc

The whole deal of using the new BSD license for libraries like Speex's
is to allow companies to release commercial source-closed
applications/devices.  This to allow wider spread of the formats.

Unless they are using the command line tools (e.g. encoder), which are
not under BSD but LGPL.  In that case, they should provide the source
code for all changes they make to the command line tool, but not to
their chip.

As such what they are doing is legal and not a violation of the Speex
license, unless I'm not aware of something.


-Ivo

On 10/1/07, Jean-Marc Valin <jean-marc.valin@usherbrooke.ca>
wrote:
> I'm aware of Microchip's closed-source port of Speex to the dsPIC.
As
> far as I know (haven't checked the details), this is perfectly legal,
> even though I think it's a dumb decision for a company that's in
the
> business of selling chips. I say it's dumb because by not contributing
> the changes back, they ended up not benefiting from significant
> improvements I made to Speex since their forked. Had they done so, the
> memory requirement for Speex on dsPIC would be smaller than what they
> have now and the quality would likely be better. In case there are any
> dsPIC developers around, you should know that the current Speex svn/git
> version (or 1.2beta2) now has small enough RAM requirement to fit on the
> dsPIC, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to create an open-source
port
> that's actually better (and of course cheaper) than what Microchip
sells.
There are a couple of us working on it.  We're both also radio amateurs, so
we hope to keep our work completly free--so it can be used in open standard
software for amateur radio--as well as whatever else people feel like using
it in.  Our code will make its way back into the main tree.

Jean-Marc,  all of your hard work in reducing memory footprint and CPU usage
is wonderful.  Thank you, very much.

Cheers,
David n0ymv