Re: GNOME-media on the road to 2.4.0

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

Hi Richard,
Currently we are distributing free software for US patented formats from
Europe. Of course if things go badly here in the end in regards to
Patents I guess moving the code repository to Brazil will be considered.

I don't actually remember the details of our discussions on non-free
plugins. What I am sure of however is that any such is not linking to a
GPL library (and never has). A situation we probably might end up with
is a mix of plugins for GStreamer under different licensed, meaning some
GPL plugins, some LGPL plugins and some non-free plugins. But each
plugin will not contain/link to code with mixed (incompatible) licensing
of course. Our discussions with lawyers so far has given us the
impression that this mix is probably not a problem, but in todays
climate any legal uncertainty tends to be a death stroke so to be 100%
sure we have been getting developers to relicense their libraries/files
to LGPL/BSD or redo the code in question ourselves. As GStreamer has
grown in popularity we have been increasingly successful in getting
library developers to relicense for us. 

In the case of applications developers we are trying to go the route of
a written statement clarifying their interpretation of their own
licensing (the GPL) in order to remove any uncertainty.
(Similar to what JBoss does with their statement about the LGPL:
http://jboss.org/pdf/why_we_use_the_lgpl.pdf.)

So our goal as we are now heading towards GStreamer 1.0 is to have all
plugins be LGPL/BSD licensed (with optional (and probably soon
redundant) GPL plugins being split out into a separate package and all
applications either relicensed or with an accompanying interpretation 
clarification from the copyright holder. A little sad that we had to do
this, but the GPL is simply to fuzzy and unclear in regards to what
triggers the GPL compatibility clauses in it.

Christian



On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 11:06 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> A year ago we had a discussion of how GStreamer supports patented
> formats, and I ended up recommending distributing free software for them
> from Brazil.  What has actually happened?
> 
> Meanwhile, you mentioned two non-free plug-ins for GStreamer.
> Do those plug-ns link with the GPL-covered libraries that we
> were discussing?  In other words, are they GPL-violating?