[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing issue with idct_mmx.c

[Ivan Kalvachev]

On 4/5/11, Alexandre Colucci <alexandre at elgato.com> wrote:
>
> The file idct_mmx.c (libavcodec/x86/idct_mmx.c) has a GPL license which
> conflicts with the rest of the libavcodec files.
> This file is apparently not used anywhere.
>
> Is this file really needed (mmx is an old architecture)? Would it be
> possible to change the license to LGPL or move it outside of libavcodec?
> The presence of the GPL license forces the client of the libavcodec to
> manually remove the file, instead of using libavcodec as is.
>
> Thanks,
> Alexandre


If you take a look of the Makefile in the same directory,
you will see that this file is compiled only when CONFIG-GPL is enabled.

The function from this file is used in dsputil_mmx.c for the
ff_libmpeg2_mmx_idct* functions. The code there is also under
CONFIG_GPL condition.


So if you haven't configure --enable-gpl, your build would not contain
that code.