[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Libfaac not LGPL?

[Kostya]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 04:45:58PM +1200, Paul Kendall wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 April 2009 12:48:50 pm Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 04:45:37PM -0700, Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
> > > We had some discussions on #ffmpeg-devel and I asked the folks at #gnu
> > > about this:
> > >
> > > http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faac/libfaac/tns.c?r1=1.8&r2=
> > >1.9
> > >
> > > It appears that libfaac, despite declaring itself LGPL2.1, contains
> > > quite a few licenses... many of which are completely incompatible with
> > > the LGPL, such as the above.
> > >
> > > In theory, it still may be legal to distribute, as the LGPL linking
> > > exception *may* cover the linking of .c files with non-free licenses
> > > with .c files that have free licenses.  However, either way, this
> > > places FAAC squarely under non-GPL territory... such that ffmpeg
> > > should require --enable-nonfree to link to it.
> > >
> > > Thoughts?
> >
> > moving it under non free is a good idea, droping it is a good idea too
> > but i guess people wont like it being droped.
> >
> > [...]
> Please, no, don't drop it! Until ffaac can do HE-AACv2 it is needed by
> folk that have DVB-T streams. More and more countries are using this
> format for their digital broadcasts.

And we (I, maybe somebody else) don't have any reason to work on
that while decoder does not support decoding. So don't blame only
me for not producing competing AAC encoder (yet).
 
> Cheers,
> Paul