New subject: SPS licence

9 Mar 2012

...
   >  You
can't make 'competing products'.  ...no, you can't use "the
Technology" to make competing products.
 jgevaryahu didn't post enough for me to be sure what "the Technology"
 means - and I would check if I cared - but I would expect it to refer
 to KryoFlux's work and nothing more, in which case this strikes me as
 eminently reasonable.

 In the stuff jgevaryahu posted, most the restrictions cited are of this
 nature.  I do see one glaring exception, that being 3.d(ii); if I were
 doing data preservation any such clause in the license for a tool would
 completely eliminate that tool from consideration for me. 
No, because the moment you would be able to put data into an IPF, you 
would also have the tool to extract it again, you would not use parts of 
the free distribution to do that. And  you would of course have your 
original data in the first place. As outlined in another reply this 
mainly addresses companies releasing bogus compilation CDs which we did 
not intend to support.

And apart from that: Our source distribution comes with a different 
(adapted MAME) licence!

http://www.kryoflux.com/download/ipfdec_source4.2.zip

This was released to make sure the format is a) fully documented, b) 
portable and c) data is not buried.

...
  It most certainly would cause me to include them out
of anything I
 might do as an individual.  Closed file formats - and this is an even
 more egregious form of "closed" than most - are nonstarters for me. 
And for this reason, and many others, there source is out there.

SPS licence (was: Re: Discferret broken?)