[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing gray area

[Justin Ruggles]

Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 09:47:07PM -0400, Justin Ruggles wrote:
>> I'm in the process of preparing the commits for the native LGPL AC-3 
>> decoder.  But I found something that may be problematic...and then again 
>> may not be...
>>
>> I want to preserve the history in the SoC repository, but some of that 
>> history has a GPL violation.  Part of the code is copied near-enough 
>> verbatim from liba52, which is GPL, but is put under the LGPL header. 
>> My subsequent commits will change that portion, rewriting the 
>> problematic code, so the result will be okay.  But the violation would 
>> still be in the source history.  So I'm not really sure how to approach 
>> this.
> 
> This would make the revisions of libavcodec containing the problematic parts
> effectively GPL, which is not a problem IMO since it just affects a few
> revisions that will immediately be replaced.  You could add a note to
> the commit log message, though.
> 
> Diego

Thanks for the replies.  I think I'll take both suggestions.  I have 
seen code before with only a marked subsection under GPL (e.g. dcraw). 
Putting a note in the commit log message is a good idea, too.

-Justin