[FFmpeg-devel] Status of yadif relicensing efforts and some general remarks on options of generating money for the project/developers

[Robert Krüger]

Hi,

first of all, sorry about the long text but it's a complicated topic
and I am trying to explain things as thoroughly as I can.

As some of you know, I have been trying to help in organizing a
relicensing of Yadif to LGPL (see earlier threads).

This is the status so far:

Of the 20 contributors 16 have stated that they would be OK with
relicensing some with conditions, some without.

Money has been offered so far in total: 8650 Euro.

One developer stated that he would prefer a proprietary license over
LGPL. This is something I would like to expand on as this alternative
has also been brought up by interested parties who want to use Yadif
in a commercial application for which they do not want to use GPL for
obvious reasons.

IANAL but I have been involved in negotiating a few license agreements
in the past Anyway, this is my understanding of the legal side of
this:

A proprietary license to my understanding would be something like the
x264 project offers, i.e. you can negotiate conditions for using their
software under a non-GPL commercial license and pay either a flat fee
or by the number of copies of the commercial software where it is
used. This is a good thing and would be my preferred solution because
It would most likely result in more money to be generated in total
and, of course, if measured by commercial standards, the code of yadif
is worth a lot more than the sum given above. So it would be much
closer to a "fair" solution for both developers and interested
companies. This is because I think for this to generate a lot more
money in the long run, IMHO you would not have to make the license
extremely expensive (e.g. the default license of x264 is something
like 1$ per software user, which, in the non-mobile case, is very
reasonable, because IMHO if you sell thousands of copies of your
commercial software, paying thousands for a library is probably not a
problem). But there are some things that would be required for this to
work.

1) Someone would have to come up with a license agreement that works
for that purpose that is agreed upon by all contributors of yadif

2) When someone is interested in licensing yadif there would have to
be a defined pricing model or someone would have to volunteer to
negotiate each individual case

3) The license would need to protect the contributors from any claims
by the licensees. GPL/LGPL are AFAICS proven in that I don't know of a
case where there has been a liability suit against an OSS contributor
for such a license (this may be as simple as copying the warranty
section of LGPL but IANAL so one would have to be asked and probably
paid)

4) To make further development by new contributors feasible, there
would have to be a legal agreement which those contributors would need
to sign to empower a legal entity that then acts as a copyright holder
and hands out and charges for licenses to interested parties (this is
something that e.g. is done by Oracle with contributions to their
Open-Source Java Development Kit). Anything else would result in a lot
of administration hassle if new contributors come in because otherwise
everything would have to be negotiated again among all contributors.

X264 seem to have built a successful business around this but they
have had the advantage that they started out with a handful of
developers and then took those steps described above in some way or
the other. And this IMHO becomes exponentially more difficult with the
number of involved copyright holders.

This is a lot of work and requires someone to invest a lot of
dedicated time. I cannot do this because it is too much work to do
aside from my day job and IMHO it is too much work for just yadif.
However, going down that route for ffmpeg is a process that would take
years (see blog posts by Jean-Baptiste Kempf about relicensing VLC to
LGPL) and be very hard due to the huge number of contributors ffmpeg
has and has had over the years.

So, AFAICS this is not a viable option for the yadif case and I would
therefore attempt to get the yadif LGPL relicensing finished and try
to suggest, how the money is split, which I did not volunteer to do
but Michael said that I as an outsider/non-ffmpeg-developer would
probably be less controversial than if some of the devs would do that,
so I'll try that and attempt to do it fairly (which is not possible of
course). I can only guarantee that I'm trying my best without any
other motivation than making this as fair as possible.

Apart from that, I am still ready to volunteer in helping finding ways
for the ffmpeg project to generate more money (e.g. by using crowd
funding mechanisms or even things like support programs (maybe take
JBoss as an example, although it doesn't have to be on this scale) or
simply sponsoring subscriptions like "I am official ffmpeg sponsor" by
paying a monthly fee) but only as part of a team. I think I remember
Stefano was also interested in getting this to work and I don't know
what was discussed in last months IRC meeting. Maybe we should talk
off-list about this.

I would also like to appeal to all companies, big or small, who are
interested in using yadif commercially, to contact me and offer to
donate for this to happen (including those who have done this
initially to confirm their offer, since so much time has passed). If
it does not work and you have offered a certain sum, it will of course
not be charged but all those waiting for this to happen who may be
thinking "oh, I'll just wait until it happens then I get commercial
use of yadif for free", please reconsider. Not only is it a good thing
to support ffmpeg/mplayer/libav devs or the project but from a
business perspective, you'll get a very valuable thing here and if it
does not happen, because developers are not willing to go to the
trouble (stuff by developers who don't agree, will have to be
reimplemented) or simply feel sold out for cheap, because the sum is
too small, you get nothing.

Yadif contributor status list:

Michael Niedermayer OK implied when satisfied with the way the money
is split but not formally given
Baptiste Coudurier Not convinced about LGPL. Would prefer a proprietary license
Stefano Sabatini OK, no conditions
Mans Rullgard No response
Aurelien Jacobs OK, no conditions
Anton Khirnov OK, no conditions
Reimar Döffinger OK, no conditions. I'd be interested in as much as
possible being used to sponsor work on FFmpeg, either via Michael or
as a donation to our SPI account
Luca Barbato OK, if all other contributors agree. Whishes (but does
not demand) that money go to FSFE
Clément Bœsch OK, no conditions
Diego Biurrun OK, no conditions (explicitly mentioned LGPL v2.1+)
Nicolas George OK, depends on conditions I suppose I will consider
most conditions acceptable, though.
Carl Eugen Hoyos OK, depends on conditions
Uoti Urpala No response
Loren Merritt OK, if he a gets a small portion of the money
Tim Woj No response 1 commit removing unused variables
Ivan Kalvachev OK, no conditions
Joakim Plate OK, no conditions
İsmail Dönmez OK, no conditions
James Darnley OK for 1000 Euro
Daniel Kang OK, depends on conditions

I'll wait a bit longer so interested parties can contact me until I
suggest something regarding the money split. Of course, if someone has
comments, corrections or whatever to what I wrote above, bring them on
here, or if you feel more comfortable that way, email me privately.

Best regards,

Robert