[FFmpeg-devel] Searching for a ffmpeg BCLO (bastard chief legal officer)

[Diego Biurrun]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 03:31:45PM -0400, Chris Ribe wrote:
> >
> > There is one more thing you should point out, though: It needs to be
> > clear which version of FFmpeg he is using and what changes he did make,
> > if any.  This is the part that may be interesting to us, there is the
> > chance that some of his changes could be useful.
> 
> Alright, I add the following and sent the letter:

Did you send off the letter already?

> > The copyright notice dialog presented by your installer should also carry
> > the copyright notices of the included software.  That is, where it now only
> > states "VEMoDe - Video Encoder for Mobile Devices, by Pablo Fuentes.
> > Copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved."  you should add the line "FFmpeg
> > version SVN-r8448, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al."  as this
> > is the copyright notice displayed by the version of FFmpeg you are
> > distributing.  Also, if you have made any changes to the FFmpeg source code,
> > those should be noted and dated in the copyright section of the individual
> > source files.

I should note here that regarding the changes made to the source code
it's more important to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the
license.  The idea is that is should be possible (and ideally simple) to
find out what was changed and how.

Having each file contain a changelog is a possible solution, but not
very practical.  A public revision control system is a good solution, as
would be a clear statement which version/revision the code is derived
from and one or multiple diff files.

I hope I'm making myself clear here...

Diego