[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing

[Arpi]

Hi,


Rich: you misunderstood my mail. read it again please.
i do NOT want it to be under the BSD license.
I proposed something to dual-license it under GPL (or LGPL) and
a commercial license, which allows the license buyer similar things
like the BSD one (compile into closedsrc code, preserve credits)

The key point here is that they cannot use that bsd-like thing for free,
they have to buy it, for lots of money. Ie they dont steal your code, they
buy it. (it's the next topic, to how to handle the money. we clearly need
a company for that, and what to do with the money: share between
developers, buy hw for developers, buy hw for server etc...)

> On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 11:15:23 +0100
> Gabucino <gabucino at mplayerhq.hu> wrote:
> 
> > 
> >  - firms DO steal -> court -> lotsa time+money consumed -> success doubtful

Sure. In case of Kiss, we were lucky. It was quite easy to prove they steal
code, as they steal mpalyer's internal format mpsub, and the 'unknown' sub,
and had the sscanf() strings unmodified. Anywya it would be still
problematic to prove this at the court.

Also, the best we can reach with gpl license, is that they will remove
the gpl'ed code from their product (ie. pay someone to re-write from
scratch, but they'll still using our ideas and algorithms, as they are
not patented).

If we have a dual license, we can sue them for causing monetary damage,
by not buying license, or sell them licenses.

> >  - firms use the second license -> money receipt or whatever
> 
> I have to agree here. Although we are a large project, we're still
> only individuals. We cannot really defend ourselfs at court if we
> have to. On the otherhand if we can prevent companies from stealing
> our code by a dual license, we might get some contributions from their
> side.

Yes.

> Now the discussion whether it should be gpl/bsd or gpl/lgpl
> isn't one at all (fortnunately or unfortunately ?). We already
> use a lot of third party gpl/lgpl code which we cannot relicense
> under bsd, thus we have to stick with gpl/lgpl.

Don't mix g1 and g2.
I'm talking about g2 only, dual licensing of g1 is impossible.

g2 code is mostly clean, most of the core was written by me alone,
some of the plugins was written/ported by someone else.
it's not too late to ask agreement from contributors now, and
remove code if they don't agree. future contributors have to
accept the dual licensing. they did in the past for libavcodec,
which has such license since years.
(as Fabrice's employer company is using it in closedsrc product)

> Something else we should keep in mind is the exact terms when
> we allow the use of one or the other license. Ie whether we 
> allow people to use the license they want or whether we restrict
> it depending on the use of the code.

yes

> And if we choose a dual license, we should apply it to the whole
> projcet, not just parts of it. Otherwise we'll end up in a
> license hell where nobody knows what may be used and what not.

it cannot be done. we won't be able to get Michael to dual-license
his code, or get libmpeg2 to do so.
it will be even problematic to get swscaler under such license, which
is required for g2 to work...

so we can keep the core and required plugins under dual license,
and let optional parts, codecs, libs, plugins to be gpl only.
plugins can even be under incompatible license (think of 3rd
party binary codecs, like the 3ivx ones for xanim/openqt).


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer G2, the Movie Framework for all - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu