RFC: New dependency on FFmpeg?

[Michael Stefaniuc]

On 08/21/2015 02:41 PM, Andrew Eikum wrote:
> 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.
Why would that be an issue for the Wine project? The Wine binaries as
shipped by Arch Linux (basically a Wine "fork") would be coerced to a
GPL3 license. But that wouldn't transfer back to the Wine project.

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

bye
	michael