Re: [Muine] Adding a clause to Muine's license

[Matthew Good <muine matt-good net>]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 19:23 +0100, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If we want to legally support proprietary audio formats through
> GStreamer in Muine, we need to do something about our license (currently
> plain GPL). See http://www.linuxrising.org/files/licensing.html.
> 
> I propose to add a clause to the current GPL license, something along
> the lines of:
> 'The Muine project hereby grant permission for non-GPL compatible
> GStreamer plugins to be used and distributed together with GStreamer and
> Muine. This permission are above and beyond the permissions granted by
> the GPL license Muine is covered by.'

Should that be "This permission _is_ ..."?

> Are people OK with this?

Well, I don't have a particular problem with it if there is sufficient
reason for Muine to do so.  I can see the advantage for applications
like Totem since there seem to be more non-free video codecs in wide use
(Quicktime, WM9, Real, etc.).  What audio formats would this enable
Muine to use that would previously have been unavailable?  I guess WMA
would fall in that category (though I don't use it).  I'm not quite sure
what the legal situation is with AAC due to the MPEG-4 licensing.  FAAD
is GPL, but apparently there are problems binaries of it.  

So, I guess since the permission is restricted to GStreamer I don't
think it would be a big deal, though I would be interested to know what
we'd be getting by making this allowance.

-- 
Matthew Good <muine matt-good net>