[FFmpeg-user] More Liberal Licensing

[Rob Hallam]

As has been stated, it seems vanishingly unlikely there will be a relicense.

However, it seems there is a misconception about the GPL here:

On Tue, 28 Nov 2023 at 10:24, Suminda Sirinath Salpitikorala
Dharmasena <sirinath1978m at gmail.com> wrote:
>*GPL means that all forks need to be public, not that the modifications need to
> be upstreamed.

The GPL does not require "all forks need to be public". A private
entity (company, organisation) can use a GPL'd project internally and
they never have to release their code. [0]

This comes up so frequently it has a FAQ:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic

Of course, if the product is released, users have the right to request
a copy of the source to the product. That is of course the point of
copyleft- if you build on the freely-available work of other people,
others should be able to use your work freely too.

Cheers,
Rob

--

[0]: Note that another option would be calling an ffmpeg binary from a
(publically-released) proprietary program, but naturally the source of
ffmpeg (including any modifications) would need to be available on
request; and if the two programs had sufficient shared state, they may
be considered as a single program and so again covered by the GPL.