Re: License question about sf2 soundfont in Tuxguitar
>From my personal experience of 15+ years contacting with authors of thousands
of "free" sound fonts: they are usually composed of sounds taken from random
places, and nobody really knows who made them or what their license are. Many
of them take samples from other "free" sound fonts, and chain gets larger and
larger so the true origin is difficult to trace. The assemblers of the sound
fonts just assume that, if they can't find a copyright notice attached to the
samples, they must be in the public domain. And most likely they are not. Even
if they were originally released under a permissive license, the license and
authors should be maintained as a minimum. Of course, there are exceptions of
sound font assemblers who correctly document their sources and licenses of each
individual sample, but that's a lot of work, and most common case is just to
ignore everything and assume that it will be fine. It's the true and sad state
of most free sound sample libraries out there.
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