[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: help on libmpdemux usage (Modifié par Jérôme Cornet)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 10:40:47AM +0100, Jérôme Cornet wrote:
> Le 13 janv. 2004, à 9:57, Alban Bedel a écrit :
> 
> >Hi Jérôme Cornet,
> 
> Hi (and sorry for the silly mail subject "Modifié par ...")
> 
> >It would probably be a good idea to explain a bit more what you are
> >doing, in particular if you intend to release the code, as some seems
> >to alredy worry about licenses/legal stuff.
> 
> Yes, of course, even if I find a bit strange those kind of email answers
> with just a question about license without any plain answer. (so thanks
> for your email with complete answers). Maybe the word "QuickTime" sounds
> ugly to many people on this list, but it is perfectly legal and 
> feasible to release
> an open source codec for QuickTime itself, binaries and source code are 
> just
> here : http://www.aldorande.net/codecs
> 
> So, to answer the question, the idea would be to make improvements to a
> component i have made and released under GPL by adding an avi demuxer
> to it.
> Maybe this post will end up in a licensing flamewar about "not silly, 
> you just should
> use LGPL instead " or "BSD" or ".... for your project", i don't quite 
> understand them much.
> I really complain about bad guys like kiss technologies (by the way, if 
> you need some
> help...) but my idea is after all to make every source code available.

QuickTime itself is non-free. Making a derivative work of MPlayer
which is linked in as a component of non-free code (QuickTime) is not
permitted by the GPL, as far as I can tell. LGPL would be required for
something like this, and MPlayer is intentionally GPL rather than
LGPL. Whether you release source is irrelevant.

Rich