[MPlayer-dev-eng] Relicensing MPlayer or parts of it to LGPL

wm4 nfxjfg at googlemail.com
Sun Dec 27 15:47:48 CET 2015


I'm maintainer of mpv, a MPlayer fork. One of the changes in mpv was
turning the slave mode interface into a library (libmpv), which
replaces the stdin/stdout parsing slave mode MPlayer uses.

One problem with this is that it forces every client to be GPL. libmpv
basically exhibits the slave mode interface as API, but since the
application code actually links to it, and the player runs in the same
address space, the GPL technically applies (in my interpretation).

To avoid this, I'm thinking of relicensing mpv to LGPL 2.1 (with the 
"or later"). While many things have changed in mpv compared to MPlayer
(and many parts have been rewritten or removed), much of its core is
still based on MPlayer, and I need agreement from the original authors
of the code.

I'm thinking it would be beneficial for MPlayer as well to relicense
parts to LGPL (or all of it, if enough contributors can be reached).
Alternatively, I'd just ask for permission to relicense the affected
source files in mpv.

Would there be any welcoming or opposing to such a move from MPlayer
developers?


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