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

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Hi,


>If paul wants them to be GPL he can change these headers at any time.

I agree with your implication that Paul *should* have modified the license headers either globally or as he modified files.

But that does not make the top-level license statement moot.

>And the "explicit license notice" you refer to is this:
>
>"All Librempeg modifications, and any new files not available in FFmpeg, are licensed under GPL v2,
> unless stated otherwise."

So, which of his "modifications" (commits) have an explicit statement "otherwise"? I guess none or almost none.

What do you think designates "all Librempeg modifications" and *not* "any new [file] not available in FFmpeg" in the text above?

Would you consider that any file that we add to FFmpeg post-fork would automatically void the license text about "new files", since those files would no longer be "not available in FFmpeg"?

>And it IS stated otherwise in these files by the license header in these
>files.

It is stated that the original files were under the LGPL (or GPL), nothing else.

If we are going to nit-pick the licensing terms, then Paul is arguably violating the LGPL/GPL in those files by not clearly recording the modifications and their license.

In other words, if we were ridiculously literal about it, Librempeg would be illegal, thus Almpeg would be illegal, and thus we couldn't merge any of this anyway.

Fortunately, the record of changes does in fact exists: the Librempeg git repo. But that being the case, we can't argue that you didn't notice that the modifications didn't have a statement "otherwise".

And sure, that's just my interpretations, but what do you think Paul *intended* here? If it come to that, the court, or more likely, FFmpeg downstreams and reverse dependencies, will probably base their decision on Paul's inferred intent, not mine, but also not yours.

>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.

That's a very overreaching generalisation. If  I start an LGPL project with a generous sponsor giving me Bay area level pay for the effort, and someone forks it into GPL in their free time, I fail to see how that would be immoral.

This is no different than a downstream project utilising a library under a less permissive license than the library.

In fact, I believe FFmpeg itself contains some code that was relicensed from liberal licenses and yet we didn't systematically feed the changes back, did we?

>You knew i was working on this and i would have appreciated a private
>message over a public accusation

That's not fair. You were given advisory warnings by people as they learnt of this and on the same channel as you informed of this (this ML), including by myself.

You had every right to dispose of your time and carry on but you can't say that you were not warned.