Re: GNOME Roadmap

[Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi,

On Wed, 5 May 2004, Dave Camp wrote:
> The foundation board has been working on a Roadmap document.  I just put
> the current draft at:
> http://www.gnome.org/~campd/gnome-roadmap.txt
> We'd like contributors to take a look at it and comment.  After some
> discussion we'll be sending this to the Advisory Board and posting it on
> the foundation web site.

In the media section:

     "- There is an explicit goal that the platform be LGPL or more
        liberal in order to allow ISVs to use the platform to create
        proprietary software.  This policy has never been formally
        documented.  Both of the proposed media options have open
        legal questions.  The Helix framework is not LGPL- or GPL-
        compatible.  It is unclear that the GStreamer license
	allows for proprietary codec implementations."

Could you specify what exactly is unclear? Is that related to the fact
that GStreamer contains GPL plugins and that those might interfere with
closed-source plugins when loaded simultaneously? It'd be nice if this
section was somewhat more verbose on the exact issues/questions.

And maybe it is worth mentioning Xine-lib here, given that both Totem (by
default even!) and Rhythmbox allow the use of it. If Xine-lib is omitted
because it is GPL, then nevermind.

Thanks,

Ronald