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

[Alex Converse]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Jason Garrett-Glaser
<darkshikari at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:57 PM, compn <tempn at twmi.rr.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:48:50 +0200, Michael Niedermayer 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?
>>>
>>>moving it under non free is a good idea, droping it is a good idea too
>>>but i guess people wont like it being droped.
>>
>> anyone email author for relicense ?
>
> You mean Texas Instruments?
>

We could still try to lobby them for a relicense. TI has much better
open source relations now than it did a decade ago when that code was
written. Furthermore, MPEG required them to release it under that
particular license. (But they still can re-release it under any
license they want.)

[...]

Regards,
Alex Converse