The licensing issue for AudioMan one area I'm a little weary of because I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to pretend to be one. It would be nice if we could just write software and not have to worry about people stealing it but this is the real world we are talking about here. Nasty people are out there: we need to protect the code.

I won't talk about specific licenses now because I don't know that much about them. The Open Source Initiative web site is a good place to start researching.

There's been some concern about licensing related to libraries that we use. This project is going to use SWT and JFace libraries included in Eclipse, which is covered by the Common Public License (CPL).

I don't know much about software licenses but I do know that it doesn't make much sense to make a windowing toolkit that can only be used if the software also follows the same license. That would rule out any completely proprietary software or GPL software using SWT. So I think we are free to pick any license we want as long as we include the CPL text with the Eclipse-related JAR files that we distribute. By the same logic as well, what good is a graphics library that you cannot distribute? It just makes sense ... but we should still check into it.

Until we know more about software licensing, it's probably best that we don't release the source code. The reason being is that as far as we know switching sofware licenses isn't that easy. Once we pick one we could be stuck with it so we should put some research into the choice.

We could definitely use help in this area guys, if anyone knows a lawyer looking for pro-bono work or just someone with enough interest to really look into it. Otherwise I'll have to twist Jim's arm. At least he took Engineering Law last semester. :)