[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing gray area

[mark cox]

On 17/07/07, Justin Ruggles <justinruggles at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> 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
> _____________


Great. It's good to have that on public record. Excellent to hear you were
pro-active on this issue.

-mark


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