There is the question of giving a license to an instrument. I was always unsure how to go about this and thus never gave my instruments proper licensing. The problem is that some of the instruments were ports of an early version of netpd that were initially written by someone else without specifying a license. Now, I think I should at least add a license to each instrument I wrote myself and add a comment to the others. Each author should define a license for their instruments. Maybe, the license can be added to the netpd meta tags so that it can be parsed easily. I am happy to hear the opinions of others on the matter.
I’m not very involved in software and coding and I don’t have a very clear idea on the issues involved so I’d like to see what other people think, but my instinct is to avoid having to get too strict about the way this is done. Could we give a kind of general open licence definition for the whole netpd project and then just mention in each instrument/fx/sequencer etc that it is a part of netpd? Most of the things that I can envisage making will be Frankenstein’s monsters of other people’s clever patching and I will give credit wherever I can but I don’t know what sort of licence would be appropriate/necessary.
Maybe you could just do a group thing, where if people agree to put their instruments on netpd, it has to be GPL, or if you prefer, MIT. That way it could settle having to manually license each instrument, and make it easier for everyone, including people who may want to reuse the code.
Actually, my preference would be to simply specify one license for everything in netpd-instruments, to keep things simple. Part of netpd is that those instrument are spread around simply by using netpd. I’d prefer if stuff from netpd/instruments folder could be re-used, tweaked, modified without having to think about authorship and licensing. So, my personal preference would be giving everything in netpd/instruments into public domain by licensing it under https://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/ (I’m not quite sure, if I’m allowed to do so. Some instruments are based on older versions written by other people who don’t seem to care about netpd anymore. ).
Then, I would add a note that people willing to contribute to instruments had to agree to the license.