[FFmpeg-devel] GPL version matter

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 12:48:43AM +0200, Reimar D?ffinger wrote:
> Hello,
> On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 10:53:20PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 10:19:12PM +0200, Christophe GISQUET wrote:
> > > Michael Niedermayer a ?crit :
> > > > theres something you miss here, and that is the following part of the LGPL
> > > > 2.1:
> > > 
> > > Indeed I missed it, thinking 2.1 was a matter of phraseology. I
> > > generally don't make my choices on absolute confidence in a sunny
> > > future, or more tersely, that I will like any GPL versions coming out
> > > any day.
> > > 
> > > > so even without the "(at your option) any later version."
> > > > anyone can take your LGPL 2.1 code and change it to GPL 12.3.4
> > > 
> > > Then let my obvious question after that obvious correction be:
> > > Are contributions under the strictly version 2 GPL accepted?
> > 
> > yes, as long as its in seperate new file(s), under proper CONFIG_GPL2 and
> > you first submit some patch to configure which does actually contain
> > the needed CONFIG_GPL* setup code and this patch does get accepted by
> > mans or diego
> > (note, the changes to configure must be under LGPL of course)
> 
> I am not at all happy about fracturing ffmpeg even further down into
> different license versions. With that there are then already 4 different
> ffmpeg variants from a license standpoint... At least some arguments why
> this is important enough to start down this messy road might be
> appropriate, in my view it is "only" optimization after all (though that
> is on the other hand a reason why I don't mind more "restrictive"
> licenses in general here, it is just having yet something else).

could you elaborate on what "down to earth" disadvantages the license
fracturing has?

the license is the authors decission and rejecting code because its under
(L)GPL X(+) / BSD / public domain seems to make no sense to me

rejecting patches which make some existing code fall under more restrictive
licenses is of course something different, but here its just optimizations
under GPL2 or none, or me spending an hour rewriting the code but i dont
have the motivaton to do that also i dont care about wmv at all unless i
happen to want to watch one and my computer is too slow ;)

and last, IMHO the "or later" clauses are somewhat concerning so its not
unreasonable if someone refuses to put his code under them
the fsf is not that trustworthy, at least not anymore since the GFDL mess

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

I hate to see young programmers poisoned by the kind of thinking
Ulrich Drepper puts forward since it is simply too narrow -- Roman Shaposhnik
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