Looking for a sponsor for MiniDisc software

[Adrian Glaubitz]

Dear Debian multimedia package maintainers,

I'm one of the developers of the project called "linux-minidisc" [1]. The goal of your project is
to bring full and free software support for all NetMD and HiMD MiniDisc recorders and players.
Both NetMD and HiMD offer technologies to connect a MiniDisc device over USB
to a computer to transfer music tracks to and from the MiniDisc device in a
way iTunes and iPods work together.

There has been a project called "libnetmd" before which offered this functionality as
well but due to the encryption of the audio data, it was never possible to download
any tracks to the MiniDisc devices even though technically possible. The project
was eventually orphaned. It was still in Debian in the Etch release, if I remember
correctly.

However, due to our endless efforts, we finally were able to reverse engineer the whole
protocols behind NetMD and HiMD and we are able to provide fully-fledged
support to both of these technologies on Linux and other operating systems.
Since some of the technologies involve intellectual properties of Sony, we
have stripped down our code to include legal technologies only. Since
this limits the functionality of our software, we are in negotiations with Sony
Corporation to get an official permission from the to distribute all of our code
and knowledge under a free license. The case has not been decided yet, but
from the previous mails from Sony, it looks like they are putting a lot of efforts
to resolve this situation for the best of the community so we can eventually
provide our software to everyone.

I am therefore seeking a sponsor to support our project to get it into Debian. The
popularity contest shows, that both packages, "qhimdtransfer" and
"python-netmd" which result from our project, are installed by several people
already. The download counters for the Windows and Mac versions have surpassed
2500 downloads, so there is certainly a demand for our software. The package
for "qhimdtransfer" can be found on Debian Mentors [2] and my Ubuntu PPA [3]. These
versions do not contain any code that may infringe the intellectual properties
of Sony Corporation and others, so they could be uploaded to Debian without
any license issues, the code is completely GPLv2.

I am already the maintainer of the two Debian packages "kcemu" [4] and "libz80ex1" [5],
so I have already some background when it comes to packaging.

I would really appreciate any support in getting our software into Debian, I have
been trying to get it sponsored for almost a year now without success.

Thanks a lot,

Adrian

[1] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc
[2] http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/q/qhimdtransfer/
[3] https://launchpad.net/~glaubitz/+archive/linux-minidisc
[4] http://packages.debian.org/sid/kcemu
[5] http://packages.debian.org/sid/libz80ex1