Re: faad2 2.5 licensing issues revisited
Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
Hi.
Looks like we may yet have to revert back to FAAD2 CVS snapshot from
2004-09-15, i.e. before the controversial README change.
I've been talking to FFmpeg/MPlayer developers and when I pointed them to
http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1482#c4 , they immediately said
it was GPL incompatible. After re-reading this again I have to agree. That
is to say, we can still distribute it, but we can't distribute GPL binaries
linked against it. At least that's what I think.
We could build LGPL'd FFmpeg and then it could be linked against faad2-2.5,
but some parts of FFmpeg are GPL and thus would not be compiled. MPlayer
comes with its own faad2 snapshot from before the change. I haven't checked
other apps.
Has anyone tried to contact faad2 upstream about these problems? Maybe they are
willing to add an exception that the advertising clause does not need to be
followed by derived works which are under the GPL? This is what for example
imlib2 does, and according to the FSF imlib2's license is GPL v2 & v3
compatible. (Note actually imlib2 says that no advertising is necessary if a
derived work comes with full sourcecode).
Regards,
Hans