[FFmpeg-devel] GPL version matter

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi,

On 6/30/07, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
>
> could you elaborate on what "down to earth" disadvantages the license
> fracturing has?


It's confusing for users of the ffmpeg (i.e. lav[ufc]) library. At the very
least, plain LGPL should be strongly recommended, though if I were to have
any say in it, I'd argue you should reject any non-LGPL (i.e.
non-LGPL-compatible) contributions. Maybe that's why I have no say in it.
:-).

The risk here is that in the future, new submissions will _themselves_ (e.g.
see libswscale) become GPL, and the problem there is that projects using
ffmpeg will not have the same featureset as others, which will reflect badly
on ffmpeg itself from both the end-user side as well as the developer side.
This GPL'ification of parts of ffmpeg would ideally be prevented at any
possible cost, even if it means feature regression or refusion to include
new features.

Ronald