Re: [Muine] Re: GStreamer Relicensing

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 17:58 -0500, Sean Egan wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:41:56 -0800, Tamara <foxxygirltamara gmail com> wrote:
> > I don't really understand how GStreamer license affects us. It doesn't
> > affect us that  Gtk+ is licensed under the LGPL so why should it
> > affect us that GStreamer is? I don't understand why "the plugin nature
> > of GStreamer" is a problem.
> 
> When Muine is linked dynamically against GStreamer, and GStreamer is
> using a non-Free plugin, that non-Free plugin is part of the same
> process space as Muine.  This makes Muine non-Free.
> 
> GTK+ is LGPL, which can be linked against Muine with no problem. 
> Although it's not GPL, the source and all "four freedoms" are
> available to it.  As soon as you start linking non-Free wma codecs,
> you introduce code to the process space for which source is not
> available, modifyable, or freely redistributable.
> 
> I'm not sure exactly how much of my patch Jorn rewrote and
> subsequently if my opinion matters at all, but I'd rather see Muine
> stay vanilla GPL.

Out of shameless curiousity, what makes adding a clause so bad? I mean,
it clearly only concerns GStreamer plugins, so what does it take away?
Ideological purity? I suppose I'm fairly "unethical" in those
matters. :)

> People who wish to use wma can load the wma plugin to GStreamer
> without breaking the GPL which allows unrestricted use. Loading a
> plugin is probably considered a "modifcation," and the GPL only
> restricts modification provided the modification is then distributed.
> 
> While keeping the license plain GPL will restrict people from
> distributing non-Free plugins with Muine, I don't see that it
> restricts people from using non-Free plugins.

The problem seems to be that nobody, no distribution will ever be able
to distribute both Muine + a proprietary GStreamer plugin at the same
time, as long as Muine is pure GPL. Because Muine might just load that
plugin during execution, thereby violating the GPL's distribution terms.
And I think we want Muine to be both able to be distributed, and, for
instance, mp3 or wma or whatever playback to work out of the box.
Apparantly without a Muine license change that is not legally possible.

Jorn