Thank you, Barry!

[Updated - 07 February, 2005]

[05.01.03] Barry Vercoe and The MIT Technology Licensing Office sets his Public Csound Free at Last! with a new GNU Lesser General Public License LGPL (and the Csound Manual Free with the GNU Free Documentation License FDL) Dear Csounders, Each time I have developed a major system for Musical Sound Synthesis I have tried to make the sources freely available to the musical community. With MUSIC 360 in 1968 that meant running to the Post Office every day to mail off a bulky 300 ft reel of 9-track digital tape, but I really did enjoy the many hundreds of pieces that emerged during the late 60's and 70's. With my MUSIC -11 for the ubiquitous and less costly PDP-11, I chose to pass the maintenance and distribution task off to a third party. This was easier on me, and led to even more pieces in the community during the late 70's and early 80's. At the time I wrote Csound in 1985 the net had now made it possible for would-be users to simply copy the sources from my MIT site, so I put my time into writing a Makefile that would compile those sources along with the sound analysis programs and the Scot and Cscore utilities. And though thiswas initially Unix, I worked with others to port it to Apple machines as well. After I was awarded an NSF grant in 1986, it became necessary to add a copyright and permission paragraph to the sources and the accompanying Manual. The spirit of my contribution however remained unchanged, that I wished all who would use it, extend it, and do creative things with it be given ready access with minimal hassle. Today the original wording of the permission no longer conveys that spirit, and the dozens of developers to whom I paid tribute in my Foreword to Rick Boulanger's Csound Book have felt it a deterrent to making the best extensions they can. So with the graceful consent of MIT's Technology Licensing Office, I am declaring my part of Public Csound to be Open Source, as defined by the LGPL standard. This does not compromise the work of others, nor does it turn the whole of Public Csound into Free Software. But it does create a more realistic basis upon which others can build their own brand of Csound extensions, in the spirit of my efforts over the years. I am indebted to John ffitch to have protected me from the enormous task of daily maintenance in recent years. His spirit is even greater than mine, and I trust you will continue to accord him that recognition as you go forward. Sincerely, Barry Vercoe