Commercial gstreamer-based application

[Sean McNamara]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Siber <marchenkovadim at mail.ru> wrote:
>   Hello, everybody!
>   I wonder if I could make my own gstreamer plugin under commercial
> license? And will I be able to use commercial license for gstreamer-based
> application (e.g. video player)? Will I have any restrictions such as using
> only self-written plugins for gstreamer and not using plugins from common
> packages (gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-good and so on)? Under "commercial
> license" I understand mainly that source code of my plugin and application
> will not be opened.
>   Thank you!

The core gstreamer libs, and the -base, -good and -bad plugins should
all be licensed under the LGPL, which would allow you to make
proprietary software based on it, as long as you don't modify the
gstreamer sources. BTW, use the term "proprietary"; the term
"commercial" is misleading. It's possible to write commercial software
that is also free software; for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
What you mean to say is that you intend to write non-free software.

If your software merely *uses* gstreamer, you can license it under any
license you want (the LGPL gives you that right). But any
modifications you make to gstreamer must be released under the LGPL or
GPL. This is *NOT* necessarily the case if you use plugins from
gst-plugins-ugly. "Ugly" contains plugins under other licenses. If you
*either* use *or* modify any plugins from gst-plugins-ugly, you will
need to comply with the license terms of each plugin you use; those
license terms may differ from the LGPL in surprising ways. You might
also need to be cognizant of some well-known software patent issues
associated with certain gst-plugins-ugly plugins. That isn't to say
that all of the other plugin packages are immune to software patents,
but just that the community consensus so far is that we don't really
see there being any credible, publicly-known patent threat related to
the use of the -base, -good, or -bad plugins (and you can also infer a
similar level of weak "community consensus" regarding the licensing
terms of said plugins, and the implications thereof.)

None of this should be taken as legal advice, and especially if you
are considering doing a large and visible project with a high dollar
value associated with it, you should hire a lawyer and go to great
pains to make sure that you are not violating any copyright licenses
or software patents in any country where you intend to do business. I
am only speaking in generalities, and my recommendations to you are
largely based upon my limited knowledge of software licensing and the
patent landscape in the United States. The situation might be very
different elsewhere.

Lastly, I am kind of glossing over the issue of adding your own,
completely new plugin. There is ongoing debate about the meaning of
the term "derivative work", and there is no clear process for
determining whether any given piece of code is a derivative work of
any given third-party copyrighted body of work. Therefore you
shouldn't assume that, just because of some technical detail, your
code wouldn't be considered to be a derivative work of gstreamer. This
is relevant because, if the software you write *is* deemed a
derivative work of gstreamer, then you would be required to release
your derived work under the LGPL or GPL (the LGPL lets you choose
between these two licenses; you can always move an LGPLed codebase to
GPL, but never the reverse.) Instead of guessing or assuming, it's
better to ask a lawyer. But if you're cheap, you can also read some
essays by Richard Stallman to hear one perspective, or search the
internet about modifying LGPLed software for the perspectives of many
other developers. For example,
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/439136.html

I know you want licensing to be as abstract and clear-cut as coding
itself, but the fact is that the legal apparatus is a complicated
machine that requires intricate knowledge to accurately traverse. You
wouldn't want a lawyer untrained in programming to write your
gstreamer plugin; by the same token, a lawyer wouldn't want a
programmer untrained in law to make legal decisions for themselves. It
goes both ways. Do what you're good at, and defer the rest to a
qualified expert.

The free software community (that is, people who write and contribute
free software to the public) often tries to establish guidelines and
best practices that help us avoid legal fees by taking a safe,
peer-evaluated, often legally-evaluated route towards developing free
software. This is all in the spirit of sharing: someone pays for a
lawyer to make a legal determination (such as a lawyer belonging to
the Software Freedom Law Center), and in return, the lawyer shares
their opinion with everyone, in the hopes that their opinion will help
save the hard-earned money of free software contributors.

If you were writing free software, you could rely upon those
guidelines. But since you seem to want to proprietize your software, I
am going to rather brusquely shrug you off now, after having given you
this much advice, and leave you to your fate.

Good luck,

Sean

>
> --
> View this message in context: http://gstreamer-devel.966125.n4.nabble.com/Commercial-gstreamer-based-application-tp3854185p3854185.html
> Sent from the GStreamer-devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> _______________________________________________
> gstreamer-devel mailing list
> gstreamer-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/gstreamer-devel
>