[FFmpeg-devel] [VOTE] License header consistency

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 09:59:24PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 09:03:55PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> [...]
> > > Besides its neither a issue of legal correctness if a LGPL variant is
> > > used that happens to have a space more or less somewhere, or uses
> > > "this library" instead of "ffmpeg" or was what diego prefered 4 years ago.
> > 
> > The header you just picked from somewhere reads
> > 
> >   * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
> >   * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
> >   * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
> >   * version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
> > 
> > There is no version of this license under that name.  
> 
> And this is a argument i agree with, a non existing license version is bad
> and should be replaced but i was not aware of this and i think iam not
> the only one. How should i guess from a "sigh" that the license header
> refers to a non existing license instead of just minor typogrphic
> things you dislike ?

We have had this discussion multiple times and I have said this multiple
times.  How you can be unaware of this is a complete mystery to me.

In fact, your memory is failing, you pointed such an issue out yourself:

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-cvslog/2006-October/004072.html

> > We have discussed this multiple times already. You choose to ignore
> > the argument again and again.
> 
> I repeatly ignored "sigh" and failed to guess what you meant?

You repeatedly committed no license headers or wrong license headers.

We have had this whole discussion about license headers multiple times
and I have reiterated my arguments multiple times.

I have made many commits to clean up and unify the license headers,
which included changing the wrong version numbers, for example:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r6597 | diego | 2006-10-09 09:31:27 +0200 (Mon, 09 Oct 2006) | 2 lines

Fix GPL/LGPL license version mismatch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r6577 | diego | 2006-10-07 17:30:46 +0200 (Sat, 07 Oct 2006) | 3 lines

Change license headers to say 'FFmpeg' instead of 'this program/this library'
and fix GPL/LGPL version mismatches.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

And one of the goals was precisely to save people from copying the wrong
headers from random places.  Now they can copy it from any file, which
takes no time at all.

Diego