[FFmpeg-devel] Yadif relicensing to LGPL

Robert Krüger krueger at lesspain.de
Tue Oct 29 10:10:43 CET 2013


On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:17 PM, Kieran Kunhya <kierank at obe.tv> wrote:
>> I don't know if you believe me but this is not the result of me trying
>> to take the easy route.
>
> What stops the sponsoring companies from backing out as soon as they
> have LGPL code?
> They can do so perfectly legally.

And one more thing regarding the companies and how this all came
about, since I do not know if you followed this from the beginning a
few months ago.

The companies all contacted Michael about this, so he knows who they are.

When I offered money for the relicensing on behalf of my company, he
told me that there were other offers and that I could coordinate that,
if I wanted to help, since he is too busy working on other ffmpeg
things, so I did. That the names of the other sponsors are not
revealed is simply because they all contacted Michael off-list and I
am not the one going to make their names public without their consent,
not because they specifically asked to remain anonymous.

It is not too unlikely most of them would also pay for a commercial
license similar to that of x264 but the legal framework is not there
for that (see the archive for my explanations regarding that a few
months ago) and is not a small task to create for a project like
ffmpeg. Would definitely require way more effort than I could invest
(and would require another qualification with all its aspects) and
would probably take a very long time if it would ever be successful
(ask J-B about his experience contacting all copyright holders for a
large OSS project like VLC, in his case for an LGPL relicensing, which
is even easier than setting up a business model like that of x264).


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