Re: GNOME-media on the road to 2.4.0

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

I am looking at old messages that I didn't answer during the year,
and came across the discussion of GNOME-media.  I did not respond
because I was overwhelmed at the time and fell behind, but the issue
is important.

Could you tell me where things stand now, in regard to the danger of
non-free plug-ins for GNOME-media?  Do any exist?  Who distributes or
recommends them?

    The question is not a purely legal question in my view, but also a moral
    one. As we (gstreamer) has discovered when talking to library
    maintainers asking them to relicense to LGPL we have sometimes
    experienced that the library authors used the GPL with the clear intent
    that they didn't want their code to be used by non-GPL compatible stuff.

Exactly.  You couldn't use these libraries in a non-GPL-covered plug-in.

    there is the moral question if we really want GStreamer or any other
    GNOME component to be tools for abuse of the original authors license be
    it GPL or something proprietary.

The moral issue comes from proprietary plug-ins.  If the all the free
code were released under the X11 license, there would be no legal
obstacle to them--but the moral issue would still be there, because of
the danger that GNOME-media would become, de facto, a platform for the
use of non-free software.  That, above all, we need to prevent.

    > The plugin itself definitely can't be GPL; it has to be something 
    > that doesn't conflict with a patent license.

    Yes, however many of the libraries in question are GPL, so I tried mailing 
    Eben Moglen asking him for some template text for an exception, similarly to 
    what people tended to need with Qt,  to add to the GPL for these
    libraries to solve the issue as many of them are not willing to
    relicense, often cause they don't acknowledge the rightfullness of the
    patents.

I think there is a misunderstanding here.  If the library's license
does not allow use in the plug-in, you cannot eliminate this problem
by adding a special exception on the plug-in's license.  (Unless the
special exception says "You can also distribute and use this plug-in under
the terms of te puttinhg GNU GPL.")

An exception in the license of the *library* could give permission
for its use in such a plug-in, but I think these authors won't want
to add such an exception.  I would encourage them not to add one.
This is a place our community needs to stand firm.


I think the solution is to reject non-free plug-ins--to write
GPL-covered plug-ins and distribute them in countries that don't have
software patents, such as Brazil.  That will do the job in a fully
ethical way.