What happens when you want to mix two libraries with different licences?

You determine if the licenses are compatible first. If they are, you're fine, as long as you fulfill the terms of both licenses.

If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.

If you own one of them, mix in LGPL code, and publish it, the result is entirely LGPL.

If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.

Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.

This is not correct; you're simply required to follow all applicable licenses at the same time. This may or may not be possible, but is in practice quite commonly done.

> Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.

> This may or may not be possible

I am not sure what you are saying, that is different from the comment you replied to.

Completely depends on how much you've "mixed in", and facts specific to that individual work.

Fair use doesn't get thrown out the window because GPL authors have a certain worldview.

Second, there are a lot of non-copyrightable components to source code - if you can't copyright it - you certainly can't GPL it. These can be copied freely by anyone at any time.

Some licenses, like LGPL, have provisions for this, some just forbid it.

In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.

You should keep them in different directories and have the appropriate license for each directory. You can have a top-level LICENSE file explaining the situation.

You dynamicly link against it

This depends on the licenses.

Copyleft licenses are designed to prevent you mixing code as the licenses are generally incompatible with mixing.

More permissive license will generally allow you to mix licenses. This is why you can ship permissive code in a proprietary code base.

As for linking, “weak copyleft” license allow you to link but not to “mix” code. This is essentially the point of the LGPL.

they waited for more than 1.5 years and they did not forgot

They were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us.

Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?

FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.

But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.

My understanding is that the GPL doesn't have fucktons of precedent behind it in court. You bet the house on a big case and lose, the precedent will stick with GPL and may even weaken all copyleft licenses.

Also, it's better to gently apply pressure and set a track record of violators taking corrective measures so when you end up in court one day you've got a list of people and corporate entities which do comply because they believed that the terms were clear enough, which would lend weight to your argument.

Saying this as a GPL hardliner myself.

AFAIK it has enough precedent (also depending a bit on jurisdiction, but you only need one) but the interpretations of what that/the license should cover differ. Like f e if you wanted to argue driver devs would have to open-source their firmware blobs or their proprietary driver loaded by a kernel shim you will have a tough time and prob lose

Most licenses, EULAs, contracts and so on don't have much precedent in court. There's no reason to believe that GPL would fold once subjected to sufficiently crafty lawyers.

It definitely does have precedent in multiple jurisdictions. Heck, SFC just won against Vizio enforcing the GPL's terms in the US, and there have been previous wins in France and Germany.

That's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.

The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.

How does

"Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too"

reconcile with

"doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL"

You can distribute your own code under Apache along with FFMpeg under LGPL in one download

if they licenced their own code under apache 2.0 as buildable with the lgpl ffmeg code, without relicensing ffmeg as apache itself

Not the global best move, or even positive, now the OSS community we lose the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).

There were opportunities to take advantage of this.

How do you partner with someone who has so much contempt for you they ignore the license you've given them and, when called on it, simply ignore you?

We are not going to loose anything. If it’s got a strong enough community then someone will publish a fork with the problem fixed

They had ample warning and ignored the license. what you're even on about?

<https://libera.catirclogs.org/ffmpeg-devel/2024-02-23>

The FFmpeg devs saw the violation, even laughed about how funny it was, then they tweeted, so the initial drama is originally not that big.

They pointed it out to Rockchip; immediately the developers from Rockchip answered (which is quite rare for big companies!):

  Herman Chen: "I apologize... lack of understanding on conflict between Apache and LGPL. We will replace these code in future update. And do more homework on open source license."

  FFmpeg: "Thank you for your message"

If you need something from someone, and they have not done it, you don't send a bomb after 1.5 years of silence. You can send a reminder.

If after these reminders, they don't know how to do, and you want them to do something, you can educate them:

  A) Fork the FFmpeg repo
  B) Move your file to that repo
  C) Create a Makefile that will build a .so with that file only
  D) Link that .so to your project

Takes 10 minutes.

If they refuse to comply, that justifies DMCA. But nothing indicates refusal in the public communications.

About the 1.5 years: silence != patience.

"We gave them time" is not the same as "we gave them a deadline and reminders" or "we communicated and they refused."

Imagine this: you buy me lunch, and I did not pay you back.

  You: "Hey, you owe me 10 USD for lunch."
  Me: "Oh sorry, I misunderstood! I'll pay you back."
  You: "Thanks for your message."

Then... nothing. No Venmo request. No reminder. No "hey, can you get me that 10 USD?"

Two years later, you take me to small claims court for 500 USD. That's not patience. That's setting someone up to fail.

Now, still:

  - Rockchip's code is gone
  - FFmpeg gets nothing back
  - Community loses whatever improvements existed
  - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner

I'm just wondering how it escalated so much ?

The amount of armchair quarterbacking here is wild.

Then waiting to see how they addressed these points and what were the approaches taken and why ?

Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc.

There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.

Then why didn't Rockchip solve it in 10 minutes?

Bad decision and risk/reward calculation for sure. If it's code that is core to your stuff, and it is GPL'd, it's (technically) very tricky to solve.

But here, as FFmpeg is LGPL and we talk about one single file, there is even less work to do in order to fix that.

Yeah, Rockchip seems to have screwed up badly but as per the GitHub DCMA notice:

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...

> ... the offending repository maintainers were informed of the problem almost 2 years ago ([private]), and did nothing to resolve it. Worse, their last comment ([private]) suggests they do not intend to resolve it at all.

Seems like the reporter gave them a lot of time to fix the problem, then when it because obvious (to them) that it was never going to be fixed they took an appropriate next step.

Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.

To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.

If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.

Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications

It's a call to push the devs to freely say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc, nothing much, these questions are deliberately open.

Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.

Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.

In the adult world you don't get any warnings when you break the law.

That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.

This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.

They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.

Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.

Your original comment had this at the end...

> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner

This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.

Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.

The OP deleted that sentence and I don't think it should have be flagged and unseen by others so I have vouched for it. I understand a lot of people disagree with it, and may downvote it but that is different to flagging. ( I have upvoted in just in case )

He offer perspective from a Chinese POV, so I think it is worth people reading it. ( Not that I agree with it in any shape or form )

The sentence is actually just in the comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396107

You are right, and the FFmpeg devs are also 100% right and I perfectly understand that.

In fact I like the idea to push the big corps and strongly enforce devs' rights.

I think earlier enforcement would have been beneficial here, just that dropping a bomb after 1 year of silence and no reminder (and we still don't know if that was the case), is a bit unpredictable, so I wanted to raise that question

There hasn't been a year of silence. Multiple people from the community have continued bugging Rockchip to address the matter in a public issue on the now-gone Github repo. The idea of a potential DMCA claim was also brought.

All they could say was "we are too busy with the other 1000s chips we have, we will delay this indefinitely".

Ridiculous.

If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins

"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."

They should be covered as an aggregation, provided the LGPL was intact.

The contention is that the ffmpeg code was "cut and pasted" without attribution and without preserving the license (e.g. the LGPLv2 LICENSE file). Obviously I can't check this because I don't have a clone and the repository is now blocked behind the DMCA enforcement. But at least Github/Microsoft seem to agree that there was a violation.

Microsoft/Github have no say in enforcement of a DMCA claim.

Uh... the repo has literally been taken down by GitHub: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp

Not sure what you're trying to say here. DMCA takedown enforcement is 100% the responsibility of the Online Service Providers per statute. It's the mechanism by which they receive safe harbor from liability for hosting infringing content.

Yes, but Microsoft/Github do not make any determination about the validity of the claim.

Once a valid (from a process perspective) claim is submitted, the provider is required to take the claimed content down for 10 days. From there the counter claim and court processes can go back and forth.

I think you may be astonished to realize a (the?) majority of DMCA takedowns are neither checked nor legitimate...

You can post your thoughts, feelings, and opinions on google blog, and I can submit a DMCA and google is required to take down your thoughts feelings and opinions immediately without verification.

Wrong. A DMCA notice is not a court order and Microsoft/Github are not legally required to follow it. They do take on liability for the purported violation if they do so but if it's a nonsense allegation that doesn't matter.

Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.

I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.

The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.

The DMCA notice is available here: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...

The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.

Thanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred.

To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.

You can find an archive of the links' targets at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:5861f19187336...

Interestingly, the repo has a LICENSES folder that contains the text of the licenses used in the repo:

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/directory/ed4b20...

And yep, they only included the most openly permissive ones there (APL2 and MIT), completely skipping everything else. Ugh.

I didn't downvote. I suspect people did because it sounded like you were defending ILoveRockchip's actions, based on either 1) not understanding what they did, and/or 2) not having access to the facts. People get snippy about abusing Free Software.

Maybe because if the ffmpeg people say they have a reason and they've waited 1 year and a half for compliance, we trust them more than whoever relicensed their code without permission.

Copy pasting code is allowed under LGPL, but doing so while removing license headers and attribution of code snippets would not be.

copy/pasting, or using some other mechanism to do digital duplication is irrelevant - the removal of the existing license and essentially _re-license_ without authority is the problem, no matter what the mechanism of including the code is.

Only if the code you copy pasted the LGPL part into is licenced under a compatible license, and Apache is not.

The simplest way to comply while keeping your incompatible license is to isolate the LGPL part into a dynamic library, there are other ways, but it is by far the most common.

this is accurate and how i should have phrased it. i should not have mentioned dynamic linking; you're right it's not relevant

thank you!

LGPL does not mandate dynamic linking, it mandates the ability to re-assemble a new version of the library. This might mean distributing object files in the case of a statically-linked application, but it is still allowed by the license.

this is accurate - thank you for the correction

I like FFmpeg, I hate doing the whole whataboutism thing, especially because FFmpeg is plainly in the right here, but... listen, FFmpeg as a product is a bunch of license violations too. Something something patents, something something, "doctrine of unclean hands." I worry that HN downvotes people who are trying to address the bigger picture here, because the net result of a lack of nuance always winds up being, "Okay, the real winners are Google and Apple."

Independent implementations of an algorithm are a different dimension from software licensing. So the “unclean hands” argument doesn’t hold water here.

Patents != copyright

What licenses are they violating?

They don't violate licenses otherwise they would have been blown out of existence a long time ago, drown lawsuit after lawsuit.

The ones that Microsoft Apple and Google pay for, the codec licenses. FFmpeg believes that only end users need licenses for codecs, which is not only their belief, but it’s not a belief of Microsoft, Apple and Google, and it is true the sense of the status quo, but also, LGPL violations are a status quo. So you can see how it’s a bad idea for FFmpeg to make a stink about licenses.

With the exception of the Apache license, most major licenses don't cover patents. I have no idea about proprietary licenses if that's what you're talking about here, but it's a bit unclear, so it might help to go into more details than "something something" if you're intending to make a compelling case.

The GNU v3 licenses all cover software patents too, and parts of FFmpeg are under those licenses too (though I guess not the code copied and subject to this takedown, which is LGPLv2.1+).

> I hate doing the whole whataboutism thing [...], but...

... yet, you did it anyway, without going into detail or providing any clue where these violations (as you claim) are.

If there's any substance to what you say, provide some details and proof, so it can be a constructive discussion, rather than just noise.

this is fundamentally false. The LGPL was created because of static linking where GPLd code would be in the distributed binary.

It's an open question (the FSF has their opinion, but it has never been adjudicated) if the GPL impacts dynamic linking.

One could argue that if one ships GPL dynamic libraries together with one's non GPLd code, one is shipping an aggregate and hence the GPL infects the whole, but its more complicated to say if one ships a non GPLd binary that runs on Debian, Redhat et al and uses GPLd libraries that they ship.