[Hydrogen-devel] GMKit licensing issues

[<ma...@sm...>]

Hi everyone,

at the end of the last week, Mira (the debian maintainer of hydrogen) 
contacted us and brought up an issue which has been reported at the 
debian bugtracker: 
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=858281.

As a short summary, a user found out that the license of the GMKit 
samples is unclear and that it might be the case that those samples were 
recorded from a synth, which might limit the use of such samples. A 
quick inquiry from our side confirmed this.

This situation is in my opinion very serious for us and we should look 
make sure that are default kits are freely distributable. As a 
consequence, i would like to remove the GMKit from hydrogen. At the 
moment i don't have an idea how we could replace it. Maybe it would be a 
an alternative to keep the name GMKit, but replace the samples (for 
compatibility with older songs).

Does anyone know of a kit with a suitable license which might be well 
suited as a default kit for Hydrogen? It should be small, universally 
usable and GM-compatible.

Another idea would be a new drumkit contest, with an extra price for a 
new default kit.

Best regards,
Sebastian