[gst-devel] gstreamer plugin license

[Julien Moutte]

Hi,

Please have a look at paragraph 11 of the LGPL :

---
11. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues),
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or
otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License.  If you cannot
distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this
License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you
may not distribute the Library at all.  For example, if a patent
license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Library by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then
the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to
refrain entirely from distribution of the Library.
---

That means that any (L)GPL component that you distribute needs to be 
redistributable with no patent restriction.

This is completely incompatible with most patent licensing agreements 
which require you to pay a royalty fee for every unit you ship.

Please find attached a document written by our lawyer on that topic.

Fluendo's products are covering part of this problem. You can license 
proprietary decoders and demuxers that will work with GStreamer and come 
with or without patent licenses.

Hope this helps,

Best regards,

Julien Moutte,
FLUENDO S.A.
http://www.fluendo.com



Edward Hervey wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 10:27 +0800, Liang Zhao wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I plan to port mpegaudioparse and asfdemux in plugin-ugly into my
>> product for resale, is it reasonable?
>>     
>
>   If you mean whether you have the right... it's LGPL, so yes :)
>
>   
>>  no any license/patent issues?
>>     
>
>   Two different things:
>   * The software license (LGPL) : If you make any modifications, try to
> push them upstream, since anybody buying your 'product' will have the
> right to demand the exact source code use to build those plugins.
>
>   * Patents. This is for container formats... and it's, to be honest, a
> very tricky situation.
>   There are some saying you need to pay royalties (to whom?) and some
> not (because container formats are trivial). But something tells me that
> if there was any patents involved ... you would already be covered
> considering that you must have decoders (asf without wm* decoders is
> useless, and mpegaudioparse without mp3 decoder also) for which you
> acquired (or are acquiring, or got the usage rights with the hardware
> decoders) a usage license.
>   Consult a lawyer.
>
>   
>>  if have, after I pay the royalty, is it ok?
>>     
>
>   The two items above are the only major items to be aware of. But as I
> said, if you're making a product, you might want to consult a lawyer
> specialized in that field.
>
>   Keep us informed of your progress and show us what product it is once
> it's released :)
>
>    Edward
>
>   
>> -- 
>> BRs.
>> Zhao Liang
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>>     
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> software that enables intelligent coding and step-through debugging.
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