Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by Culonavirus on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:53AM
(#39588666)
FFMPEG. Look at the amount of legal horse fertilizer here: https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html ... and every time I've seen people asking what they can and can't do, someone from the ffmpeg devs (once in a couple of years when they actually respond to someone) just says "talk to your lawyer". I mean, flip a few switches and suddenly you're under a different licence ... and all this you have to look up yourself. Many (especially smaller) devs just don't care and distribute ffmpeg together with their (often non-oss) tools. Given the amount of these in the wild, if someone really had an axe to grind, they could sue hundreds, maybe thousands of devs of all sizes. It's a total minefield. And one of the most popular (L)GPL packages in existence.
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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by adev_ on Monday March 04, 2024 @08:55AM
(#39590516)
It is currently pretty clearly describe. Compile it in LGPL mode and you are good for propriétaire use cases.
There is nothing fundamentally dangerous with the LGPLv2.1.
It is mainly annoying in case of static linking due to the obligation of providing object files but will not contaminate your codebase like the GPL does.
Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by Semaphor on Monday March 04, 2024 @09:02AM
(#39590597)
My experience with FFMPEG is that it’s usually not directly distributed for probably those reasons. The only times I remember getting it directly with software, was for GPL software.
Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by Culonavirus on Monday March 04, 2024 @09:58AM
(#39591243)
Eh, I'm just gonna point out that you can find ffmpeg code (proprietary decoders even) distributed with Electron. I'm not even going to think about how many proprietary apps built on top of Electron have no idea about that. Look at the answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67799370/legal-issues-in...