[MPlayer-dev-eng] MEncoder license inquiry

[Vince Negri]

> yichun.huang at kodak.com wrote:
> > Hi MPlayer team,
> >
> > I'm the developer of MediaCoder (http://mediacoder.sf.net), an audio/video
> > transcoder software which uses MEncoder as video encoder. MediaCoder is
> > made up of a GUI application and a library. The library is the glue to put
> > together all of the decoders, encoders (including MEncoder, which is also
> > the most important one) and tools it supports and let them work together.
> > MediaCoder is distributed under GPL license. Recently I'm going to make a
> > branch of current MediaCoder source code tree to make a new library (still
> > open-source) for use in a commercial software (part of it will be
> > closed-source). I want to know if this action is permitted or is it
> > possible for me to be granted the right to do this? Looking forward for
> > your reponse.

MPlayer is GPL, not LGPL. This means, AFAIK, that you can't take
MPlayer code, put it into a library, and then link closed-source
components against it to create a binary that has both GPL and
closed-source sections. You cannot create a closed-source application
that contains MPlayer/MEncoder source code, or statically links
against it. If your closed-source application just invokes a GPL
application (as a separate exe) that's usually a different matter.

Of course, the code that you have written yourself (for MediaCoder) is
yours to license as you see fit.

[Disclaimer: IANAL.]