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

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 2:21 PM Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Mar 2019, at 18:50, Marton Balint wrote:
> > > - do we want to keep any components requiring linking with non-system,
> > > closed-source software? (this might or might not include blackmagic)
> > >
> > > or some other variant that also includes system software like nvidia
> stuff?
> > > Or ask a simple yes/no for each component separately? (Although that
> > > wouldn't set a more general policy.)
> >
> > I prefer votes on a case by case basis, because it is hard to categorize
> > closed source components.
>
> I disagree.
> First you should vote for the global concept of non-hardware closed source
> libraries.
> It will avoid doing 20 votes for each time this action will come.
>
> > (ok, maybe not NDI, but for
> > M264/Nvidia/Blackmagic it is definitely not trivial).
>
> Those are hardware based libraries, done to access hardware.
> They are very easy to differentiate from non-hardware libraries.


I disagree with the whole hardware concept.

The GPL does not mention hardware (instead, they use the word "system
library"). Going from here, I don't consider enterprise-level hardware like
Matrox $$$ priced stuff to be a system library at all. My system certainly
has no hardware or drivers or system-level libraries that are
API+ABI+functionally compatible with Matrox' tools and wares - under any
license, not open-source and not closed-source. How can the system library
exception possibly apply here?

(I understand nvidia may be a special case because the interface is
actually entirely through ioctl()s and there are opensource drivers and the
userland compatibility library is enitrely opensource - maybe the
system-library exception actually applies here - even though binary blobs
are loaded, I don't know. But matrox and blackmagic? This seems crazy.)

Ronald

(Also, aside from all of this, my concern is philosophical as much as it's
legal. But I'll leave that for some other email.)