[FFmpeg-devel] Yadif relicensing to LGPL

[Robert Krüger]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Kieran Kunhya <kierank at obe.tv> wrote:
>> Payment will happen upon relicensing.
>
> Is that some kind of joke? What's to stop you from disappearing as
> soon as the code switches to LGPL?

No, it is not. However, the question is legitimate and not unexpected.

Lets suppose I am planning such a fraud. What would IMO happen?

- My name and that of my company are burned here for good hurting my
business a lot more than not having yadif as it is of great value to
my company to get questions answered, reported bugs fixed and that
developers are open to sponsoring for certain tasks.
- As soon as this would be discovered, it would make sense for the
project to ask all devs to relicense back to GPL, I doubt anyone would
not agree. This leaves me with a piece of software that is a ticking
time-bomb as I am certainly not capable of maintaining it (and my
impression is that neither of the other sponsors is). Building a
product using that version of yadif to save a few thousand Euros would
be a braindead business decision.

What are the alternatives?

- Make an agreement were the sponsoring companies pay first or make an
advance payment.

I am happy to offer my company's part of the sponsoring money in
advance as some kind of security, if it helps. However, I am not the
one who is going to negotiate such a deal with two or three corporate
legal departments. If that is required, I am out and I will need to
invest my time into yadif alternatives. Getting it this far has been a
lot of work already (much more than I had naively expected) and I
simply cannot invest significantly more time in this and I don't
expect this to be something you get done with two or three emails if
it could ever work as there is not really the possibility of anyone
signing an agreement on behalf of ffmpeg.

I don't know if you believe me but this is not the result of me trying
to take the easy route.