Using the GPL for soundfonts

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megurineturilli
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Joined: 01/10/2012

I'm currently working on a sound synthesizer that will be released under the GNU GPL. It uses a custom soundfont format based on vorbis. I'm not sure if I can use the GPL for a soundfont, as the GPL is designed for software.

Michał Masłowski

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 05/15/2010

I have no experience with sound synthesis. Maybe these comments on the
use of GPL for non-program works can be useful.

GPL works for nonsoftware works, while itt has requirements that might
be too inconvenient for some cultural works: the license text must be
included with the work, source must be provided in one of specific ways,
etc. Including license text could be a problem for a small visual work.
Source provision should be easy with GPL3 (both binary and source
available via the network, or physical copy of the binary with a written
offer to download the source), while distributing a book under GPL2
would require including machine-readable media with the source (e.g. a
CD) or a written offer to get such medium.

For many works "source" and "binary" are the same. I think it's not a
reason to not use the GPL for these.

There might be many works under free and GPL-incompatible licenses like
CC-BY-SA that could be useful to merge with your work into a derivative.
This can be a good reason to choose one of these licenses, or
dual-license your work under GPL and other licenses. (There are blogs
with articles trilicensed under GPL, FDL and CC-BY-SA for this reason.)

There can be special issues for works that are used to make works of
different types. E.g. fonts are programs that are often embedded in
documents, GPL-only fonts probably cannot be embedded in documents under
FDL or CC-BY-SA, so GPL with font embedding exception or a license
specifically designed for fonts is used.

Do these issues occur with soundfonts?