avifile
Hi ppl,
Has anyone taken a look at packaging avifile, the X/QT AVI player, available
from http://divx.euro.ru/ ? I've been using it recently, and I could package
it easily, but its licensing situation is a bit deranged :)
Quoting doc/LICENSING from the source:
The most obvious problem is the fact that library uses closed-source
Win32 DLLs. It can be considered to be 'creating derived work' by
including these DLLs into GPL'ed code. In other words, library may
seem to be 'linked' with these proprietary binaries. That's actually
a fringe case - the strict definition of 'linking' does not exist yet.
I prefer to think of the DLLs as 'plug-ins', which are separate from
main library and voluntary to use. That's why I distribute binaries and
sources in different packages - you do not need binaries to compile library
and even to run some test programs. One can someday rewrite DLLs using C/C++
and thus make AVIFile library completely platform independent.
The DLLs themself are freeware - you can easily get them from lots of
other places. Their licenses typically do not say anything explicitly
about this way of using them. I believe there's nothing wrong in it.
This project includes GSM 6.1 audio decoder, which is taken from XAnim.
XAnim is licensed as 'free for non-commercial use' - not compatible with
(L)GPL. That part needs to be rewritten to resolve this issue.
The situation with DLLs would require putting avifile packages in contrib, I
think, because although they're not formally linked, you get little or no
functionality from avifile without them.
The last paragraph clearly makes it impossible for us to legally distribute
avifile, it's like the old KDE/QT1 mess. Does anyone volunteer for rewriting
this? :)
--
Digital Electronic Being Intended for Assassination and Nullification
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