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by kragen 1564 days ago
It's universally accepted that aggregating free software with non-free data does not make the software non-free. The explanation in the repo about the licensing is correct and perfectly okay from an OSS perspective.

The software's copyright holder cannot infringe his own copyright by distributing the software from his own website, even if he also offers a GPL license. If he were accepting contributions from other people you might have a case, but he says he isn't.
1 comments
joe_the_user 1564 days ago
The GP isn't saying that the author is making the software unfree by mixing it with commercial software.

The GP is saying that author is distributing that software as unfree with a different license since as copyright holder, the author can do whatever they wish. QT, for example, is distributed as GPL or with a commercial license.

Which is to say the GP is correct this is possible and it's a sleazy maneuver.

Which is unfortunate since I actually am playing with Linux audio software and I'd love to find a good free software synthesizer. LMMS is OK but this does seem pretty impressive.

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mellow98 1563 days ago
Surge is an awesome open source synthesizer that is getting updated all the time: https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge

LMMS is a digital audio workstation, not a synth. If you're looking for another FOSS DAW there is Ardour.

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kragen 1564 days ago
Oh, because the distributed binaries aren't really open-source because they're made from a different version of the source? That's true, and it might come back to bite the author.

What do you think of Vitalium? I don't know enough about synthesizers to have an informed opinion.

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joe_the_user 1563 days ago
I'm only getting my feet wet on synthesizers but it gives the impression that it has a lot of cool and unique features, even compared to commercial synthesizers or LMMS, the synthesizer I've looked at the most .

The problem is these people saying they're open source then playing game pisses me off much more than if they said they were commercial with a free version.

So I'm torn on trying them. And I can't get the github code to compile on Ubuntu 20.

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