[FFmpeg-devel] FOMS 2009 FFmpeg outbrief

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:55:12AM +1100, Peter Ross wrote:
[...]
> 3. CONCERN: Authorship
>    "The practises used to develop FFmpeg are considered as questionable."

A lot of things are considered questionable by various people these days
like, "may i use this hammer i bought to open a nut, or did i give up the
right to use the hammer as i need when i signed the EULA"
Ownership of a piece of hw or sw should end the moment it is bought/sold.
EULAs as such should be illegal they are clearly not in the interrest of the
people. We have copyright to protect the authors ...
This mess has happened because people just dont give a damn and click
the "i agree" button without ever even considering the implications or
reading the text. If companies where loosing money because people would buy
other products that have no EULAs the problem would disappear ...
Someone should write a EULA that says that the user will pay 10$ per hour
of use of some program and then see how this is digested by the courts,
either it would weaken/invalidate EULAs as such or it would open peoples
eyes about why one shouldnt agree to these things so easily.
</rant>
Anyway, reverse engeneering is legally protected thus there is nothing
questionable on it, any kind of "you may not reverse engeneer" clause is
invalid by law in europe.


> 
>    This is perception stems from the unwillingness of authors to associate
>    their names with particular blobs of code.

a minority of authors are, and its understandable, not because their actions
would be questionable on legal or moral grounds but rather because if one is
a normal person and writes an independant implementation that competes with
some multi million revenue generating commercial product, one is taking some
risk. Theres no need for the big company to be legally right to be able to
cause quite some annoyance to one ...


[...]
> 5. CONCERN: Suitability of libavformat API
> 
>    Libavformat API is considered inadequate for 'tight' integration with
>    gstreamer.
> 
>    So presently there is a libavformat wrapper within gstreamer, but is not
>    used by default. Gstreamer provides its own demuxers. This prohibits
>    demuxing of all the gamer & special-interest formats that libavformat
>    supports.
> 
>    A similar comment was recorded on the FFmpeg TODO/wiki list years ago
>    concerning MPlayer.
> 
>    GOAL:       Make the libavformat API more appropriate to users
>    OBJECTIVES: Review the TODO list item, is it still valid?
>                Survey existing libavformat users; gather API requirements.

above all we need a list of what exactly is causing problems, what exactly
can how exactly be improved, ...


[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and
there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up
some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. -- Plato
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