Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] 24bit multi-io audio card compatibility, Was: CVS

[Mark K. <mar...@co...>]

On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 11:32, be...@ga... wrote:

> > 
> > And what's the current legal state of the 'stream from disk' patent? Has
> > anyone determined if this is a problem for this tool? 
> 
> 
> In 1991-1992 I worked for a small italian multimedia company
> Digimail S.r.l ...
<SNIP>
> ...I resided in the US I would be 100% ok).

<hehe!!> Sore spot, 'eh?! ;-) (Just joking! I get it's important AND
that it's a pain...)

> The disk streaming part was entirely developed by me (see old evo sampler
> versions about 3 years ago), I take the full resposibilities for that,
> so other developers do not need to fear anything related to this topic.

Great.
> 
> If you feel you are breaking a patent just don't use linuxsampler or if you
> want we firewall the server in a way that only EU people can download the code.
> Do you want this ?
> (of course the previous sencence was meant to put between <SARCASM></SARCASM>
> tags :-) )

Benno,
   This is completely a non-issue for me. It was nothing other than a
question. I have no personal position on patents, other than I hate
writing them. I hold some number (4, 5?) of U.S. patent, all hardware
related. They are just something I do for the companies I work for as a
condition of employment. Left to my own devices I'm far too lazy to
bother! ;-)

> 
> Plus try to think logically: if this patent was really non bogus then
> why were not Steinberg (Halion) and NI (Kontakt) sued out of the market.
> NI appeared very late on the audio scene but seems that most of 
> disk based sampling users are switching to Kontakt.

My understanding was that Kontakt still does not really stream from
disk, but I may be wrong about this. That was from Northern Sounds
recently, but it's just talk, not a legal statement by anyone who knows.


> Can we get back to linuxsampler technicals ?

:-) YES!! :-)


> We will use our own performance file format (perhaps XML).
> LS is not a GSt copy it only loads GIG files just like many other
> softsamplers.

Perfectly OK. gsp files are easy to build and are completely dependent
on the Sampler. 
> 
> PS: Mark do not take my rant personally it is just that I hear the same
> questions popping up again and again and I'm amazed that people do not
> realize how weak a patent about "loading a piece of file in RAM"  is.

Certainly. I didn't take it the least bit personally. Please don't take
offense in the future when 100's of people coming from years of GSt
background ask the same questions. Take some time and write a position
statement on it today, put it on the web site and let's just point
people towards it. The only thing I can promise you is that I'm not
going to be the last to ask it!! ;-)