[Ffmpeg-devel] Potential FFmpeg Licence Violation 'Koyote Ipod video converter for free'

Måns Rullgård mans
Tue Apr 10 14:18:41 CEST 2007


Reimar D?ffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de> writes:

> Hello,
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 05:49:21PM +1000, mark cox wrote:
> [...]
>>  the recipient agrees to the terms of this Agreement. You may not reverse
>>  engineer, de-compile or disassemble the Software, except to the extent that
>>  this restriction is expressly prohibited by applicable law. You may not
>>  distribute printed copies of any user documentation provided in electronic
>>  format. Regardless of the type of media you receive, you may only use the
>>  portion appropriate for your single user computer/workstation.
>
> A "standard" EULA, but this part is in violation of LGPL section 6 if
> they link against libav*
> Someone ready to contact them? Maybe they are just one of those who
> don't know what they are doing... You can always hope after all...

If they are using the directshow wrappers in ffdshow, it is far from
clear that they are violating anything by the process of linking.  If
they are simply requesting, say, an MPEG2 decoder through the standard
directshow api, their product is no more a derivative of lavc than it
is of any other MPEG2 decoder with a dshow interface.

Linking aside, since they are distributing lavc, they must also
distribute source for lavc, regardless of the license of their code.

As always, it is best to initially approach them in a friendly tone,
alerting them of their duties.  If they refuse to comply, we can start
getting nasty (well, as nasty as we can get without deep pockets
feeding the lawyers).

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mans at mansr.com




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