[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: MEncoder license inquiry

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 11:57:30PM +0800, yichun.huang at kodak.com wrote:
> >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.
> 
> I'm not putting any code of MPlayer/MEncoder into my library. It is still 
> in the form of an executable binary file. My library invokes MEncoder (I 
> patched MEncoder to let it stream out audio data through a pipe to my 
> library), monitor it and read statistics from the console. So is it 
> correct that this won't break GPL, as long as my patch on MEncoder is 
> published?

I would say yes.

Diego