[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Cherry picks vs merges

[Vittorio Giovara]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2025 at 5:32 PM Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc>
wrote:

> > I'm not against merging his changes, and i apologize if what i said
> before
> > sounded like an accusation, but the way i want this to go forward is with
> > him being ok with it, and not us trying to find a way to workaround what
> was
> > seemingly his intention to license his changes a certain way.
>
> If Paul and everyone agrees, of course thats better and I would prefer
> that too.
>

I don't agree.


> But also keep in mind he didnt ask us if he can take our LGPL code.
>

"our" lgpl code? There is no "our" in a copyleft license. There is
authorship that grants permission to use and take the code as needed (and
defined by the license) regardless of us, them, or you.


> > > That said, with open source and free software it is the morally correct
> > > thing, if one makes changes to code, to return these changes to the
> parent
> > > project under the same license as the parent project.
> > > This is morally the ONLY correct thing one can do.
>

Not unless the maintainers of the original project acted in such a way to
split the community irreparably.
It happened a bunch of times in the history of foss, for example with
xfree, libreoffice and so on: the license change prevented "stealing"
contributions and the better codebase with a more mature community took
over. What is morally incorrect is trying to solve a social problem in a
technical way.

At any rate, maybe the TC can intervene and decide what to do?
Thanks
-- 
Vittorio