[gst-devel] Mozilla & gstreamer

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

Hi Michael,
As Michael Smith pointed out, relicensing GStreamer would be very hard,
the problem is that when you been around 10 years, the list of
contributors tend to become very large for a project as big as
GStreamer. That said I don't think any of us have any big issues with
the MPL as such, as it is pretty much equivalent to the terms of the
LGPL, so it is just about the huge amount of work it would be to find
all the past contributors and get them to agree, and in the case someone
has fallen off the face of the planet, figure out exactly what they
contributed back in the day to see if it is still in there and if so if
it can be replaced. If we limit the relicensing to the core that would
make it a bit more viable though.

Of course my feeling is that this change would probably not be enough
for Mozilla, as glib would still be LGPL-only, and I think getting glib
relicensed would probably be an even more herculean task.

I have been talking with Christopher about GStreamer and Mozilla from
time to time, and while I would be willing to do some legwork to get
code tri-licensed, my impression is that no plausible relicensing option
would be acceptable for Mozilla. (Not a criticism of Mozilla, just a
statement of the current status).

So my current hope is that we will reach a point where Mozilla decides
that all this media stuff is just to painful to handle themselves and
thus be willing to reconsider the licensing requirement :)

Christian


On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 13:05 -0700, Michael Dale wrote:
> Mozilla is looking to include auiod/video capture for Firefox and the 
> Mozilla platform in the future. Gstreamer was proposed as a technical 
> solution. Technical issues aside Chris Blizzard expressed concern over 
> issues with licenses. Before technical issues for gstreamer with Mozilla 
> Firefox can be fully considered the license issues have to be sorted.
> 
> As far as I understand (hopefully Mozilla will follow up with some 
> details)  the core code and the code for the capture modules would have 
> to be trilicensed? Since everything is already available under the least 
> restrictive form (the LGPL) I imagine the gstreamer community would be 
> oky with this. I don't think the purpose of the gstreamer communities 
> license choices where to exclude the use of the library by Mozilla 
> foundation open source web browser.
> 
> If these license issues can be sorted a more technical discussion can 
> follow as to whether gstreamer would be the best choice for inclusion of 
> these features into the Mozilla platform.
> 
> --michael
> 
> 
> Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> > We can't ship gstreamer.  We don't ship under the LGPL.
> >
> > That being said, we can link to it on Linux.  We would just need  
> > something for the Mac and Windows as well.
> >
> > --Chris
> > _______________________________________________
> > theora mailing list
> > theora at xiph.org
> > http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/theora
> >   
> 
> 
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