I went through the specs and discovered some nice things. First, there is the section which says that you are only allowed to distribute a solution based on this paper, if you distribute it in “object code“. Another funny thing is a “part d)”:

“For a variety of reasons, […] your license rights to the Specification are conditioned upon your not creating or distributing your Implementations in any manner that would cause MTP (whether embodied in your Implementation or otherwise) to become subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License. An “Excluded License” is any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to the Excluded License, that such software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (x) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (y) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (z) redistributable at no charge”

So, if my english is not to bad, you are explicitly not allowed to make an implementation within a Free Software license…

Another thing, later on, is the small sentence at the bottom of every page:

“Not For Publication or General Distribution”

Hm, I mean, they provide it by themselfes. I pasted the download link here in the blog, does that mean, that I publicate it now?

Another interesting part is that you have to get a special license if you want to implement some goodies described in chapter 14. That ought to be a technical device standard?

The next guy who tries to tell me that M$ does not try to control every piece of software that exists now or will ever exist gets my private gold medal for beeing out of touch with reality…

Well, at least you can now clearly recognize why M$ wrote the enhancement of ptp: they want to control mtp and want to avoid that Free Software is closing up. I could have guessed it…

I can only hope that they guy from iriver will answer, in other cases I have to try to bring their player back to the shop and get my money back. Wouldn’t be easy