RFC: New dependency on FFmpeg?

[Andrew Eikum]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 03:10:17PM -0500, Josh DuBois wrote:
> On 8/20/15 2:47 PM, Andrew Eikum wrote:
> >Wine packagers and developers, do you have any thoughts or objections
> >to depending on FFmpeg/libav's libavutils and libavcodec for xaudio2
> >support?
> The FFmpeg web-site says FFmpeg may be found in both GPL and LGPL forms:
> 
> " FFmpeg is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
> (LGPL) version 2.1
> <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html> or later.
> However, FFmpeg incorporates several optional parts and
> optimizations that are covered by the GNU General Public License
> (GPL) version 2
> <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html> or later. If
> those parts get used the GPL applies to all of FFmpeg."
> 
> It seems difficult to say when wine loads it which license applies.
> I think this is an area where things may not be entirely clear
> license-wise, but couldn't that pose a problem?

Thanks for looking into this. Looks like the license of the resulting
binary is configurable at build-time. On Arch Linux, at least, FFmpeg
is built with GPL3 code, so Wine can't use the binaries. Arguably,
packagers would have to be aware of this and provide two FFmpegs, one
under each license. I don't think anyone's going to like that.

This might be another argument in favor of pulling the WMA code out,
as the WMA code is LGPL.

Andrew