[Ffmpeg-devel] FFmpeg naming and logo

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 10:47:07AM +0100, Michel Bardiaux wrote:
> Rich Felker wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 03:16:25PM +0100, Michel Bardiaux wrote:
> >>
> >>Why? You have probably eaten a non-free lunch and are sitting on a 
> >>non-free chair...
> >
> >Apparently you fail to understand the meaning of free. I would suspect
> >that Michael can freely immitate the food he made for lunch, cooking
> >something similar or almost identical for his friends or himself or
> >anyone he pleases. As for his chair, other people can sit on it if he
> >wants to let them; he can disassemble it and study how it's put
> >together and use that knowledge in order to build a new chair, etc.
> >
> >Use of and dependence on non-free software is not acceptable, and it's
> >utterly hypocritical to design your logo in a nonfree data format with
> >nonfree software. Don't try to warp the issue with nonsense analogies
> >that don't hold water.
> 
> Fortunately I seem to have developped some immunity to your typically 
> harsh style, ...

Judging from the manner in which you jump into this flamewar, the
opposite appears to be true.

> I suppose you dont use a mobile phone because the embedded and network 
> software arent opensource?

Check out Harald Welte's talk about the subject "Towards the first Free
Software GSM Phone - Reverse Engineering the Motorola EZX (A768,A780,E680)
series of Linux-based GSM phones" at the Chaos Communication Congress
last year:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/768.en.html

> BTW why do you bother with ffmpeg since its 
> not GPL, which by your rules is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil?

FFmpeg is free software under any definition of the term.

> The rules for the dev of ffmpeg (or of any opensource software I know 
> of!) do not put any restrictions on the tools one uses, a non-free 
> editor or IDE or movie-analyzer is supposed to be OK, as long as the 
> *final* code is not thereby subject to restrictions.

Dependence on non-free tools is deplorable, but unfortunately sometimes
unavoidable if no adequate free alternative exists.

> By the same rules, using Photoshop would not 'taint' the logo. What
> *is* to be avoided is the reliance on any copyrighted artwork (like
> brushes or patterns or textures coming with the software under
> insufficient or obscure licensing terms).

You fail to see the point.  Proprietary software (often) comes with
proprietary file formats.  I'm not sure how good Gimp supports Photoshop
documents now, but the last time I checked years ago it was incomplete.

Diego