[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: help on libmpdemux usage (Modifié par Jérôme Cornet)

[Tobias Diedrich]

Billy Biggs wrote:

>   The GPL itself was written before plug-ins became a standard part of
> software distribution, and before operating systems became the all-
> encompasing systems that we see today.  Merging these two concepts
> further complicates the problem, but we can try to decompose it.

In this context I think the following part of the GPL FAQ is also very
interesting:

|What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal
|question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper
|criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes,
|rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the
|semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are
|interchanged).
|
|If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are
|definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run
|linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means
|combining them into one program.
|
|By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication
|mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are
|used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But
|if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging
|complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider
|the two parts as combined into a larger program.

So in the case of a codec, where I can easyly make a GPL-Wrapper which
takes arguments (input stream parameters) and an input stream
(compressed input data), prints status messages (output stream parameters)
and writes to a file (uncompressed output data), then this can be
considered two seperate programs and would be ok.

So it may really be more a question of how tightly the two works are
integrated into each other and less a question of whether we link or
not, which is only a technical measure to implement the coupling.

-- 
Tobias						PGP: http://9ac7e0bc.2ya.com
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