Well, Mike Schrag is the original copyright holder of JEmplode (though I believe the copyright on the latest version is listed as us jointly holding it); I didn't jump into the project until fairly recently, and most of what I've done so far has been optimizations and interface touchup. I (with a colleague) am the copyright holder on the new ID3 library code I'd like to drop in, which has not seen any kind of public release yet. However, the copyright ownership on these things doesn't matter - because while we could very easily release JEmplode under, say, a BSD license if it was just our code, the emptool code from Empeg which is ported as part of JEmplode's underlying libraries is licensed under the GPL. Ports of GPL software must be licensed under the GPL; thus JEmplode's underlying libraries must be licensed under the GPL; thus - unless we do bizarre Java reflection trickery such that JEmplode isn't really "linked against" the GPL'd libraries, which is costly both in programmer sanity and in application performance - JEmplode itself must be licensed under the GPL. :(

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Daniel M. Zimmerman, Caltech Computer Science
Mk.2 #060000058, 36GB
Mk.1 #00101, 10GB