[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing gray area

[Michel Lespinasse]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 11:38:35PM -0400, Justin Ruggles wrote:
> Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 09:47:07PM -0400, Justin Ruggles wrote:
> >> 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.

I was actually quite grumpy about that at the time, though I had not
complained to the list. I'm quite glad you've noticed this and about
the suggestions earlier in the thread.

Note that the original SoC proposal had been to implement E-AC3
which is a significant extension over the base AC3 format. If this
had gotten done I would not mind about the LGPL license at all -
I was only unhappy because the project did not go much farther than I had.

If you get to E-AC3 first and want that to be under LGPL I'd be totally
amenable to that (assuming there is still any of my code left at that point -
if there is none then I would not have anything to say anyway :)

-- 
Michel "Walken" Lespinasse
"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain
in a James Bond movie." -- Dennis Miller