[Ffmpeg-devel] About LGPL for commercial product

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 11:19:52AM +0100, Luca Abeni wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 10:43 +0100, Luca Barbato wrote:
> > osman osman wrote:
> > > Dear
> > > I want to use ffmpeg in my closed source commercial product.
> > > Is it possible with LGPL license?
> > 
> > Read the rules, in short, as long you do not modify the library but just
> > link (dynamically) to it, you can without any constraint but the usual
> > ones you have when distributing the library alone.
> This is probably unrelated to the original question, but I always
> wondered why LGPL is not ok with static linking...
> 
> Out of curiosity: if I statically linked my program to libavcodec, and
> then I distributed
> 	1) the binary of my program
> 	2) the source of libavcodec
> 	3) the .o needed for obtaining my program (when linked with libavcodec)
> 
> would I violate the LGPL? (would I need to distribute a makefile too?)

Although this is not exact, but a IMO good rule of thumb I heard is: it
must be easy to replace the LGPL code, e.g. by a new version without
loosing functionality. A Makefile I wouldn't consider important for just
3 files, but if it's 500 .o files in 100 directories or so, you are at
least a "bad guy" if you don't include one, whether it is actually legal
or not.

Greetings,
Reimar D?ffinger