WMA support

[Scott Wheeler]

On Sunday 10 October 2004 18:36, wsong wrote:

Hmm, I actually clicked reject on this, so I 'm not sure why it went through.  
First a couple of things:

(a) Don't send copyrighted material to mailing lists for which you are not 
allowed to redistribute.

(b) Please don't send large attachments to mailing lists; post them to the web 
and link to them in your mail.

> I'm new to here and I like taglib very much. 
>
> But it doesn't support asf/wma tags currently. I'm considering add
> asf/wma support for it. Here I have some questions:
> 
> 1, I downloaded the ASF specs(enclosed pdf file) from M$ website. But
> I'm not  a lawyer and not sure if we can use this for Tag retrieving
> purpose. Surely we don't need to distribute the specs itself. Maybe
> you guys can review the EULA in the file.

Well, it doesn't take a lawyer to interpret:

  I. (ii) reproduce and internally use your implementations of ASF made 
  pursuant to the terms of this Agreement (your  Implementations ) in source 
  code form solely for internal development and testing of your Solutions, and 
  (iii) reproduce and have reproduced in object code form only, your 
  Implementations and distribute, directly and indirectly, your 
  Implementations (only in object code form) solely as part of and for use 
  with your Solutions.

Basically that says that you can't distribute the source code for your 
implementations of the spec.

Also almost every clause of section 2 of the EULA is incompatible with the 
GPL.  I stopped reading there.

> 2, I found mplayer supports ASF tags and the header file(enclosed
> asf.h) comes with it is well organized. So can we just adopt this
> header file or do we have to, or prefer to, create a new one.

No, we can't.  MPlayer is GPL'ed; TagLib is LGPL'ed.  You can't take GPL'ed 
code and copy it into an LGPL'ed project.

And all of that aside, there's a standard policy that I have on not supporting 
formats without at least one Open Source encoder; I'm not really interested 
in helping to spread proprietary codecs.

-Scott