[gst-devel] The copyright field in plugin descriptors and GST_COPYRIGHT

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi Andy,

as for the license thing: that's good for non-GPL apps which don't want
to link against GPL plugins. The idea is that you implement a callback
function before the plugin is loaded. This callback contains the
GstPluginFeature thing, which contains the license field. This way, the
callback can say "no, don't load this after all".

As for the transition: I think we already said that this transition
could have been done a lot smoother if there had been some discussion.
Fields in the PluginDesc thing:

struct _GstPluginDesc {
  gint major_version;                   /* major version of core that
plugin was compiled for */
  gint minor_version;                   /* minor version of core that
plugin was compiled for */
  gchar *name;                          /* unique name of plugin */  
gchar *description;                   /* description of plugin */
  GstPluginInitFunc plugin_init;        /* pointer to plugin_init
function */
  GstPluginExitFunc plugin_exit;        /* pointer to exiting function
*/
  gchar *version;                       /* version of the plugin */
  gchar *license;                       /* effective license of plugin
*/
  gchar *copyright;                     /* informal copyright notice */
  gchar *package;                       /* package plugin belongs to */
  gchar *origin;                        /* URL to provider of plugin */
                                                                                
  GST_STRUCT_PADDING
};

These last three (copyright, package, origin) don't make any sense at
all; the package manager is supposed to handle that, and nobody cares
about them anyway, definately not given that their content is utterly
useless (as you've stated already).

I don't think the actual copyright of pieces of code moved to all
GStreamer maintainers, the code is still solely owned by those who wrote
it, unless you've given explicit written permission to do otherwise
(contact your local lawyer to be sure blabla IANAL (*)). So yeah, I
favour your idea to remove them.

Ronald

(*) I love disclaimers.

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer