[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] G722 decoder

Baptiste Coudurier baptiste.coudurier
Fri Mar 27 00:39:15 CET 2009


Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:00:19PM -0700, Baptiste Coudurier wrote:
>> [ unrelated rants ]

Are you trying to be pathetic ?

> You are changing the topic.  There are two issues being discussed here:
> 
> 1) Whether or not FFmpeg should accept LGPL v2.1 only contributions.
> 2) That FFmpeg's license is in fact LGPL v2.1+ / GPL v2+ right
>    now as I just clarified in the LICENSE file.

Well, about 2) I already expressed concerns about 2 files in the FFmpeg
codebase namely vc1dsp_mmx.c and fdctref.c, which are not _explictely_
part of FFmpeg, since it is not mentioned in their header, and are not
under LGPL v2.1+ explictely since it is not mentioned in their header
either.

I still don't know if we need to _explicitely_ relicense them to LGPL
v2.1+, if we want to _distribute_ FFmpeg as a "whole" as LGPL v2.1+.

The fact that we are _allowed_ doesn't tell if we _need_ to or not.

I still need clarification on this.

> Reasonable people can certainly disagree about 1).  We two disagree and
> will not reconcile our opinions in the near future.
> 
> There is no way to disagree about 2).  Your claim that 2) is false is
> preposterous.  Reimar, Mans and I have tried to explain why, but you do
> not listen to reason.  Thousands of OSS projects who have handled
> licensing this way in the past have apparently been wrong all along.

See above about 2)

>> No, I certainly don't run out of arguments.
> 
> You certainly do not run out of steam.

And I certainly won't in the near future.

> I suggest we drop the topic for good now.  1) will not be resolved and
> arguments have not managed to convince you of 2) until now, I don't
> know what will.

Why would 1) not be resolved ? It seems you are the one running out of
arguments.

Accepting contributions as LGPL v2.1 only is not harmful for the FFmpeg
project in its current situation. It may be in the future if:

We want to accept contributions as lgplv3 (or later), but in this case
we would have to upgrade to lgplv3+ anyway.

In this case we have to drop the contribution and reimplement it.
So in other terms:
- in your solution, we loose the contribution if the contributor does
not want to relicense.
- in mine, we have it until we switch to lgplv3+ (which is unlikely to
happen any time soon).

In my world, my solution wins everytime.

-- 
Baptiste COUDURIER                              GnuPG Key Id: 0x5C1ABAAA
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FFmpeg maintainer                                  http://www.ffmpeg.org



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