Can you help me understand what organization you represent and your specific interest in the software rights to help better answer your question?

This is a plea to Freescale to release as much as possible of the source code for the Empeg car-player firmware, freely into the car-player enthusiast community. We believe Freescale currently own the rights to this code; certainly Sigmatel used to own them before Freescale bought Sigmatel. We would like it to be available, as there are certain bugs and infelicities in the released versions, many of which could be fixed by the community if we had access to the source-code.

We admit upfront that this is not a commercial operation. We don't have any money to pay to Freescale for this, and it's unlikely to lead directly to additional sales of any Freescale products; we can ask only in the hope of goodwill on Freescale's part.

Concretely, what we wish to propose is this:

• Freescale collect the source-code for the v2.01 and v3alpha11 releases of the "Empeg" codebase, from 2003 and 2005 respectively; as recently as December 2007 this was still available in Sigmatel's SVN server as module "empeg". Perhaps it still is, or perhaps backups from that time exist.
• Freescale determine under what licensing conditions they're prepared to hand out the code, if any. Using the GPL, for instance, would prevent us (or anyone else other than Freescale) from producing "proprietary" or closed-source products from the released code. Or Freescale could stipulate whatever alternative licence they chose, that would let the community modify the code and release modified versions. Of course, as Freescale would remain the copyright holders, this would not in any way restrict Freescale from also offering the code or other derived software under commercial licences to their existing and/or future commercial partners. (For instance, we believe that the current PMP SDK for the STMP3700 may contain some derived software from this code; nothing we propose should in any way affect Freescale's full and free commercial rights in these products.)
• One or two individuals from the community (but who formerly worked for Sigmatel), under NDA with Freescale, would work with Freescale to exclude from the releases any elements which Freescale are under external obligation *not* to give away; for instance, the Microsoft WMA decoder would fall into this category. For our community's purposes, we only need those parts that Freescale own outright, not any of those third-party elements. We already have community volunteers for this role.
• Once everyone was in agreement about the contents of the release, it could be distributed either via Freescale's own website or one belonging to the community, whichever Freescale preferred.
• Once released, the community could work to replace with open-source equivalents any sections removed for third-party contractual or other reasons.
• Everyone would then be very grateful to Freescale!

If within Freescale you'd like to find someone who knows a bit more about the history with Sigmatel and Empeg, you could try talking to [NAMES OMITTED for privacy -- I'll PM them to you, Boelle], who were there at the time these events happened.