Originally Posted By: Boelle
but i like to be one step ahead.. what if they just give away the rights? should the source then be complete free or should there be some kind of control?

It'd be easiest for them (as well as, fortunately, most convenient for us) if they gave it away under one of the standard Open Source licences: MIT, BSD, LGPL, or GPL. Releasing it as GPL would mean nobody could make closed-source proprietary versions of it, a restriction which could conceivably appeal to them. On the other hand, it's not like Freescale make money by selling software in the first place, let alone this particular software, so they might not mind releasing it under MIT or BSD. In particular, even though an Empeg itself contains no Freescale products, Freescale might be persuaded that the more open-source embedded software is out there, the more people will buy embedded chips of all varieties, including theirs.

You should bear in mind that the actual car-player v2 and v3 releases did contain some code which Freescale either won't have, or couldn't give away if they did: particularly, the MP3 and WMA decoders. So whatever they gave us might not build out-of-the-box, nor contain all the v2 or v3 functionality if it did. But at least for MP3, there are open-source alternatives which the community could then patch in.

If they're amenable, you'll probably then need a volunteer to go through the source code (under Freescale NDA) to remove all the bits Freescale can't give out. I'd be happy to do that, if it came to it.

Peter