Re: GNOME-media on the road to 2.4.0

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 18:25, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 06:14:56PM +0200, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> > Secondly we have now started this drive
> > to relicense applications to the LGPL, starting with gst-player that we
> > have relicened and which next release will be LGPL
> 
> If you think that is necessary, then nobody shipping GNOME, GIMP,
> Gnumeric, AbiWord, OpenOffice, Evolution, etc. can also ship the
> patented codecs. Unless gstreamer's usage is confined to only the
> media player.
Well most of these apps will only use non-encumbered stuff. The player
will probably mostly used for encumbered stuff, at least until we manage
to reach a marketshare where we can help give the good stuff like the
Ogg and Matroska formats critical mass. If you had actually read the
rest of my previous mail you would have seen that I replied to this in
regards to your question about Gimp making a beep sound.

But I do see your argument that Evolution playing movies attached to an
email inline isn't that different from gst-player or totem. I guess when
the times comes Red Hat, Ximian , Sun and so on just have to decide
wether the GPL 'evolution the movie player' isn't violating its own
license by being distributed with Quicktime movie playing capabilities.
As mentioned by you or Bastien the GPL is about distribution not use, so
I guess this is a pure distribution related issue.

The funny part of this argument where you have at times been rather rude
'wink wink', is that I haven't been persuing it for my own part,
personally I couldn't care less, the reason I have been doing it is
because I wanted the legal stuff in relation to multimedia in GStreamer
and GNOME to be as non-questionable as possible even for US companies.

And on the opposite end of the scale I didn't either want us to be
conduct through which people could use GPL libraries under terms against
the explicit wishes of the authors of those libraries.

> At that point I would request that you put the patented codecs in a
> "gstreamer-nonus" package or something if you haven't, so we don't
> have to munge your tarball (if we can't ship the patented stuff, we
> can't even ship the source; so we have to break open the tarball,
> munge it, and repack it).
This is on our todo list actually

> Of course "nonus" is looking less and less likely to be accurate, the
> EU appears to be on the verge of adopting software patents.
True, however I hope that the EU will no be accepting people to patent
stuff already out there

Christian