Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Meridian Audio transfers software apps business to Roon Labs

Just thinking out loud.

Meridian bought Sooloos and its associated I/P and brought on board Sooloos employees.

Some of the ex-Sooloos employees have now left to form Roon in what some believe is a divorce like separation.

In the intervening period, Sooloos v3 is developed as a new software architecture, capable of running on non-proprietary cores and addressing a number of user requests (such as track level meta-data, Android control etc.)

The v3 development was publicly disclosed on this site by Enno, so the development work was presumably being done with Meridian's knowledge and consent.

If the development work was being paid for by Meridian, internally or via contract, why wouldn't the work product be owned by Meridian?

If it were an other than amicable divorce, I would have thought there would be a fight over the I/P that's being used as a basis for the new company.

Maybe Meridian saw that v3 could have a much larger market than being within the MDMS, and that efforts to try and sell it as a software products to other customers (such as Linn) would represent a channel conflict. Spinning it off into a separate company, provided it's seen as being (or is) independent, would open up the wider market. If so, I assume that Meridian would be paid for the I/P directly or via licensing.

As MDMS users, this may be materially no different than what we might have seen if v3 had stayed within Meridian - they might have asked for a lifetime or annual fee for a major upgrade anyhow. It wouldn't be different from most software then - you can stick with v2.x and just get maintenance updates or pay for the new v3 to get new features.