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

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 04:48:39PM +0000, Adam Rice wrote:
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> >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.
> 
> As far as I know, QuickTime loads codecs at runtime. Thus the codec is 
> not linked into QuickTime. So the only two relevant questions are:
> 
> a) Does Apple place restrictions on the licenses under which third-party 
> QuickTime codecs may be distributed?
> b) Is binary code under a GPL-incompatible license linked into the codec?
> 
> I would expect the answer to both of these questions to be "no". In some 
> circumstances it could be legal even if the answer to the second 
> question was "yes", as QuickTime is an OS component under MacOS, and the 
> GPL has a specific exception for that.
> 
> As an aside, the GPL places no restrictions on "Making" anything. It 
> only places restrictions on distribution, and only on binaries at that.
> 
> I should point out that these comments apply to GPL v2. Some people 
> consider the ability to make GPL'd plugins for proprietary software to 
> be a loophole that needs to be fixed in a future version. It seems to me 
> this can't be done without placing restrictions on use, which would make 
> the GPL no better than the proprietary software licenses it seeks to 
> replace.

Not at all. Someone is perfectly free to make a plugin for a
proprietary system out of GPL code for their own private use, but the
GPL does not give them permission to distribute this derived work
since it is linked (even dynamically) to proprietary code.

Rich