[Ffmpeg-devel] moving non-SIMD parts of libswscale to LGPL

Steve Lhomme slhomme
Wed Nov 15 21:18:44 CET 2006


Michael Niedermayer wrote:

>>>> What will the decision process be?
>>> You will not be a part of it, that's for sure.
>> Interesting. Who will be, selected on what basis?
> 
> whos ffmpeg do you mean? the one on your harddisk can be switched to GPL
> at your decission, the one on mine is switched to GPL if i decide so
> now the one in ffmpeg svn can be switched to GPL by anyone with write
> access (though he would likely loose that access if he does that change
> to files not written by him)

I think that's precisely the issue here (at least from my 
understanding). Although the license is now LGPL there's no guarantee 
(by a company, by a group of maintainers, etc) that it will remain as 
such. But I'm confident that the FFMPEG license will remain LGPL, so 
it's mostly theoretical.

Now I don't really like the fast move to libswscale when the license is 
not even clear yet. So basically the current state of the code in FFMPEG 
is GPL only. Because it uses swscale.h which is GPL. And there's no way 
out of that file.

I don't question the fact that libswscale is better than img_resample. 
But why not keep img_resample and offer the option ? At the minimum as a 
compile option, but even better at runtime. If you want to make 
comparison it's even easier that way.

Steve




More information about the ffmpeg-devel mailing list