[FFmpeg-devel] [VOTE] License header consistency

[Diego Biurrun]

I was convinced to throw away my first draft of this message so that we
can spend time on more constructive things like SoC...

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 07:08:25PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> 
> Simple question
> Do we require all developers to ensure that *GPL license headers are
> precissely copy & pastes of the one master copy diego picked?
> 
> My vote is NO
> 
> my argument is that this wastes developer time that can be spend doing
> something more usefull even if its just little time, but such little
> times add up, and its not only time to fix the headers but also to diff
> them against a reference before each check in.

If it does take you more time to paste a header from any random file in
FFmpeg instead of somewhere else, or if you just cannot get this right
after multiple tries then the problem clearly lies elsewhere.

> Besides its neither a issue of legal correctness if a LGPL variant is
> used that happens to have a space more or less somewhere, or uses
> "this library" instead of "ffmpeg" or was what diego prefered 4 years ago.

The header you just picked from somewhere reads

  * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
  * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
  * version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

There is no version of this license under that name.  We have discussed
this multiple times already.  You choose to ignore the argument again
and again.

Diego