[gst-devel] gstreamer cleanup

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 05:11:32PM +0200, Ronald Bultje wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 15:49, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > I think we should also move out all code/plugins that *might* be 
> > encumbered.  FFmpeg is one of them, I'm not sure about monkeyaudio but it 
> > might be too due to the weird license.  I think our core gst-plugins 
> > should only contain undisputably unencumbered stuff.
> 
> Patents? Each country has different ideas and different ways of
> interpreting this term. It's too simple to just let it go because "some"
> country in the world "might" be bothered by companies that deliver that
> "sort of" code to their customers. Does it hurt *us*? That's the
> important question, imo.

i'm not a legal expert, but i think we just need to create some
"distance" between gstreamer and (possibly) patent encumbered
plugins.  i don't know how much "distance" is a good balance
between sufficient legal protection and sacrificing usability.

My preference is just to add a warning to the plugin information:
"maybe patent encumbered -- use this plugin at your own risk"
And perhaps a command line option to enable/disable patent
encumbered plugins.  Dunno if this is legally worth it though.

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