[whatwg] Google's use of FFmpeg in Chromium and Chrome

Daniel Berlin dannyb at google.com
Sun Jun 7 11:45:44 PDT 2009


You guys would probably be less confused if you actually stuck to the terms
of the license instead of trying to parse the examples :)
In any case, I doubt its worth asking the fsf, since at least in the US,
only the ffmpeg folks would have standing to enforce, so its their view that
really matters.
I'd be interested in knowing what the ffmpeg folks think (for example, if
they felt what we were doing was not right, I'm fairly positive we'd just
switch to differently licensed libraries).

On Jun 7, 2009 2:08 PM, "Miguel de Icaza" <miguel at novell.com> wrote:

Hello,

> I also understand that the LGPL doesn't explicitly "require [anyone] > to
pass along patent righ...
At this point, I am just as confused as Hakom.

I am curious if someone has contacted the FSF for the interpretation of the
LGPL in this particular case.

It would make a lot of people's life easier if they could license patents
from MPEG-LA and redistribute ffmpeg.

We are on a similar situation with Moonlight where we ended up distributing
proprietary codecs for VC1 (also MPEG-LA licensed) instead of the open
source ffmpeg.

Today our answer for those that want to use ffmpeg (and it is my personal
choice as well, since I rather dogfood open source software)  is to compile
Moonlight from source code and use the ffmpeg code themselves instead of
depending on proprietary codecs to be installed.

Miguel.
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