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

[Karl Wood]

D Richard Felker III writes:
> 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.

Just so you (people reading this) know where I stand, I respect the
GPL and I have to deal with its implications day-to-day. This isn't
a knee-jerk reaction, honest.

My "hobbyhorse" is maintaining compatibility between mplayer and
mjpegtools - I greatly value them both. Hence I took a look at "man
mjpegtools" and there's an option to "use Quicktime as output format"
in there, and also a file COPYING in the archive I downloaded
containing the string "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June
1991".

So it seems to me (naively) that there's an instance of a GPL program
"out there" that supports (part of) Quicktime. I am no lawyer. We
should perhaps distinguish the (possibly GPL-friendly) Quicktime
wrapper format from the proprietary Quicktime codecs?

As far as I can tell Jérôme Cornet looks like he's trying to the
"right thing" but I tend to take the optimistic view of people's
motives.

Karl