[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Libfaac not LGPL?

[Jai Menon]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 04:45:37PM -0700, Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
>> We had some discussions on #ffmpeg-devel and I asked the folks at #gnu
>> about this:
>>
>> http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faac/libfaac/tns.c?r1=1.8&r2=1.9
>>
>> It appears that libfaac, despite declaring itself LGPL2.1, contains
>> quite a few licenses... many of which are completely incompatible with
>> the LGPL, such as the above.
>>
>> In theory, it still may be legal to distribute, as the LGPL linking
>> exception *may* cover the linking of .c files with non-free licenses
>> with .c files that have free licenses. ?However, either way, this
>> places FAAC squarely under non-GPL territory... such that ffmpeg
>> should require --enable-nonfree to link to it.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> It's no different than AMR, so we should require --enable-nonfree.
>
> But dropping libfaac support might be a better idea.

Dropping aac encoding support without having any roadmap or plan
regarding when/how the native code will be merged doesnt seem like a
good idea IMHO. Even then, iirc libfaac is one of the more complete
implementations available now so dropping should be considered when
ffaacenc has reached a certain maturity.


-- 
Regards,

Jai