Re: [Muine] Re: Muine (!) Relicensing

[Mike Rhodes <mike rhodes gmail com>]

See this mail on the gnome-multimedia list about this issue:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2005-January/msg00004.html

I believe that this is the prefered way to go from GStreamer now,
judging by the mails I have read on the list. As far as I can tell,
most developers have been contacted that the gst guys could get hold
of and many, if not all, have agreed to relicence their code.

There is a dispute in the GPL about whether the GPL allows for using
proprietary plugins in the manner that gstreamer does. Therefore, if
you take the view that the plugins would need to be GPL in order to
use them from a GPL application, the extra clause allows for the
playing of proprietary plugins.

Anyways, I support this change, if only for the reason that it appears
to be the best way to cover ourselves at the moment.

Hope that helps, please correct me if I've made any miss-assumptions,

Mike.


On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 02:12:23 +0100, Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 14:41 -0800, Tamara 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.
> 
> The fact that GStreamer is under the LGPL is not the problem. I am not a
> lawyer, nor particularly interested in the matter (I just want Muine to
> be able to play WMA and to be able to be packaged legally), but I share
> Matthew's interpretation of the issue.
> 

[...]

> > Before making any licensing changes, I want to wait to see how the
> > GStreamer community is moving. We cannot relicense without consulting
> > *all* of the GStreamer developers from the past. It is a developers
> > right to choose the license that their work will be distributed under.
> 


-- 
"One should not aim at being possible to 
understand but at being impossible to
misunderstand." - Quintilian