[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] News: Removal of libndi

Jean-Baptiste Kempf jb at videolan.org
Wed Mar 20 21:36:20 EET 2019


On Wed, 20 Mar 2019, at 18:03, Maksym Veremeyenko wrote:
> On 20.03.2019 17:37, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Mar 2019, at 16:35, Martin Vignali wrote:
> [...]
> >> We don't talk about a contribution remove for technical reason.
> >> But a contributor's work remove in order to try to annoy a licence
> >> violator.
> > 
> > Absolutely not. The work was removed because the library is 100% closed source and userland.
> 
> when do you plan to remove nVidia and BlackmagicDesign parts that is 
> /closed source and userland/ ?

0) addressing me directly like that is unfair, and unjust; notably when NDI was not removed by me.
But let's say that this is just a miscommunication, and not a personal attack; so I will try to do a summary about those issues.

1) First, I've been quite vocal on those 2 topics, in the last few weeks, including today, about those 2, on IRC. And I've talked to the maintainers of those parts, notably Philip.

2) Both of those are addressing drivers for actual cards. 
So we're not talking about userland, but accessing drivers which are part of the OS, and are therefore exempted by the GPL.
This is the case for both nVidia and Decklink. Not NDI.

So, your point about userland does not really stand.

3) Both of those have headers that are open source. Not NDI.

3a)
nVidia headers have a repository, that is actually maintained by people from this very project.
The question about non-free on nVidia is about the compiler nvcc that is not open source.
There is currently no-consensus whether this compiler is covered by the GPL exemption: are we in a similar case than java before openjdk, or the GNU project before gcc was created?

3b)
Decklink headers are open source, but are normally distributed in a package that is not open-source.
Whether the license of the headers is stronger than the package license is not clear. It is also not clear if someone who agreed to the package license can redistribute those headers to the other people?

Best,

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf -  President
+33 672 704 734


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