license? about commandcam

[tedburke]

CommandCam is "free" in the sense that I have made it available for people to download and use without paying for it.

CommandCam is "open source" in the sense that I have published the full source code.

Since my starting point for this code contained a lot of the example code from MSDN, I'm really not sure whether or not I am legally entitled to make it available under e.g. a GPL / LGPL license without carefully auditing it to excise any traces of that code.

By "all rights reserved", what I mean is that I reserve copyright on the code I wrote. In case I decide to do something in the future with the code I've written, I don't want to find myself constrained by any decision I make now. However, if you or someone else wants to build on this code to produce a GPL program, I'll be happy to consider any reasonable suggestions. If you're reluctant to use the program (sourcecode or binary) because of the license, explain your position and I'll see if I can help.

Regarding MinGW support, all of my previous attempts to compile DirectShow programs using MinGW have failed, so I don't currently have any plans to support it. I don't know whether or not it's actually possible to compile CommandCam with MinGW. Again, if you have any suggestions, I'll be happy to hear them.

[umlaeute]

thanks for your explanation.
i think it would be good to add a bit more detail about the license on the public webpage, in order to not confuse people like me about the exact meaning of "free" and "open source".

afaik, "publishing the full source code" does not qualify as "open source" as read by the OSI and other open source apologists.
so your "free" basically means "free as in beer" rather than "free as in speech".

i totally understand the uncertainty regarding the usage of MSDN example code. i personally have the feeling, that examples/ that are part of an SDK are kind of "public domain", so everybody (who has a legal right to use the SDK) is entitled to produce software using those examples under a license of their own choice - else those examples/ would basically be worthless as they would prohibit the use of the SDK rather than propagate it.
however, i am not a lawyer nor am i versed in copyright law (and all its multinational facets), so what i've said doesn't mean much.

as for retaining your copyright, you will keep that even if you pulish your code under GPL/BSD/... and you (being the copyright owner) can of course publish the code under any other license (including proprietary EULAs) in parallel to a "FLOSS" version.

[umlaeute]

as for MinGW: i think you are using strmbase.lib which afair is a C++-library, so it cannot be used with MinGW/g++ which uses a different ABI...

[umlaeute]

regarding license of the DirectShow samples, i also found this: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsdirectshowdevelopment/thread/caad42fb-03fd-4e07-9bdf-eca69a9efaac

[tedburke]

Ah, that's interesting! Thanks for digging that up. It's very helpful. I'm currently investigating which license to use. I plan to clarify the situation further in the coming days.

[prydonius]

Hey,

Sorry to bump an old issue, but I was wondering if CommandCam could be bundled with another project? The project in question is https://github.com/mroth/lolcommits.

Thanks!

[tedburke]

Hi Prydonius. CommandCam is now published under the GPL v3. I've added the relevant info to the source code file. Hopefully that will do the trick? lolcommits looks great by the way - what a clever idea!

Umlaeute, thanks again for your advice above. Sorry it took a while to get around to clarifying this issue. I find software licensing very confusing!

I think I can close this issue now?

[prydonius]

Awesome, thanks! I'll add a copy of that license in lolcommits when I'm at my computer.

Great work by the way, CommandCam is brilliant, I hope you'll be continuing development on it (support for different image formats would be awesome).

[tedburke]

Thanks Prydonius, I'm glad that people are finding it useful!

I'm not really doing much with CommandCam at the moment, because I began writing a different program that does something similar to CommandCam, but uses the DirectShow API in a slightly different way. This other program is called RobotEyez - it's described here on my blog and here on github. RobotEyez has some additional features that I find useful for really simple machine vision applications. For example, it provides an option to run a user defined command after each image is captured. Perhaps that feature could be used to automatically convert each image to a different format using ImageMagick or something similar?

I should probably publish RobotEyez under the GPL too.

[prydonius]

Ah that's interesting, I'll check it out. Lolcommits currently uses Imagemagick using a Ruby library (e.g. To add the text to the picture) but imagemagick is quite a big dependency, but I'm sure there are smaller libraries out there for converting images.

Anyways this is probably going off topic now :-P. Thanks again!

[mmiscool]

I have an open source project that uses command cam to capture images. My project is licenced under the MIT licence and I was including the compiled version of command cam and a file named "Command Cam Licence.txt" that has a link to this repo. I just want to make sure this is ok with you.

[tedburke]

Hi mmiscool,

That's fine. Go ahead!

Ted