[gst-devel] gstreamer legal patch

[in7y118 at public.uni-hamburg.de]

The license field is supposed to tell you the license of the .so you are 
linking against. The ultimate goal is to figure out if you may load the plugin 
and link your application against it in the plugin loader and refuse to load 
wrongly licensed plugins. So this means you need to specify a license in the 
license field that satifies the requirements of all code and libs you link to.
mad will therefore report "GPL" (because libmad is GPL), plugins linking to BSD 
code (like vorbis) will report "LGPL" (because the plugin code is LGPL) and so 
on.

And the other thing which Brian already said: It's our goal to make the code of 
the core and the plugins (the modules gstreamer and gst-plugins) completely 
LGPL. This simply means that every file that is included in our tarballs and 
has a license header has the LGPL header. AFAIK this is a requirement for the 
core already (and the reason for killing putbits) and is under investigation 
for the plugins.

Benjamin


Zitat von Brian Cameron <Brian.Cameron at Sun.Com>:

> 
> Thomas:
> 
> > just a quick check - did you change the licenses so that the license
> > inside the plug-in reflects the library license, or the plug-in license
> > ?
> > 
> > It seems to me you change the fields to match the library license, while
> > I seem to remember that we wanted the plug-in to reflect it's own code
> > license, not the supporting lib.
> > 
> > If I'm reading this wrong please put me in my place.
> 
> In my discussions with Christian, the license field is supposed to 
> mention the license of the supporting lib.  This is because all of the
> code in gstreamer and gst-plugins *should* be LGPL, so it would be
> relatively uninteresting to always report LGPL.  Also, the person
> who runs gst-inspect is interested to know the ramifications of
> using the plug-ins, not really the license of the plugin itself.
> So my patch currently lists any plugin with a GPL dependency as
> a "GPL" plugin.
> 
> I am sure Christian will correct me if I am wrong here.
> 
> Perhaps it would be more clear if a new license field were added
> that stated more clearly.  Perhaps "Plugin LGPL with GPL dependency",
> or some-such?
> 
> Brian
>