[Libav-user] Building with purchased libraries

[Hendrik Leppkes]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 2:35 PM, Phil Turmel <philip at turmel.org> wrote:
> On 12/09/2015 02:47 AM, Yury Udovichenko wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Our company is in process of purchasing binary version of x264 library
>> from the legal representative of the library owner. This means we are
>> not required to open the sources of our application.
>>
>> In addition we would like to use ffmpeg as part of the project but to
>> use x264 library, we have to use "--enable-gpl" flag.
>> This makes the project eligible for opening all sources under GPL.
>>
>> Our question is how do we build ffmpeg in a way not to be eligible for
>> GPL? E.g. can we fix the build system not to use --enable-gpl parameter
>> and release ffmpeg part under LGPL?
>
> You quite probably cannot.
>
> The code in ffmpeg that utilizes the x264 library is under the GPL, it
> appears.  Buying a commercial license to x264 doesn't give you any
> rights to code in other projects.
>

Actually that is incorrect. The wrapper code in FFmpeg which uses x264 is LGPL.

If you have purchased a commercial license for x264, its generally
accepted that you can remove the configure check to remove the GPL
limitation from x264 for your own builds.

- Hendrik