[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing gray area

[Justin Ruggles]

mark cox wrote:
> On 17/07/07, Justin Ruggles <justinruggles at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>> Michel Lespinasse wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> 
> IMHO, Justin went about this the wrong way. If you are going to re-implement
> existing code under a different licence, you shouldn't even be reading the
> existing code. Perhaps i am jumping the gun and you had permission from the
> original author to use it as a reference. In the future i would keep it a
> secret that you used some other code for reference ;)
> mark

I haven't been using it as a reference, but it appears that Kartikey did 
when he wrote the decoder last year.  I have tried to keep my viewing of 
the code to a minimum, but when Kartikey referenced a GPL source I felt 
that I needed to look deeper into it to find out what other sections are 
based upon it.  When I rewrote much of the code (which hasn't been 
committed yet) I did not use liba52 as a reference.

-Justin