[FFmpeg-devel] Big companies taking advantage of ffmpeg developers

[Crypto]

Michael

from the manual

The Niagara SCX Pro, which contains MPEG-4 encoding technology, is based 
on international standard, which is rapidly becoming the format of 
choice for fute multimedia solutions. The MPEG-4 implementation in SCX 
follows the guidelines of ISO/IEC 14496-2 specifications, which make the 
system compatible to the most popular third-party MPEG-4 implementations 
that use the MPEG-4, Simple Profile and/or AdvancedSsimple Profile.

Seen that they use ffmpeg for Flash and MPEG-4 encoding.

Michel Bardiaux wrote:
> Crypto a ?crit :
>   
>> Michael
>> Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 02:22:20PM +0200, Crypto wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> I just wonder why some companies refuse to give credit to you, I 
>>>> discovered that Viewcast Corporation http://www.viewcast.com have launch 
>>>> a new version of their main product  Niagara SCX and the only apreciable 
>>>> advantage is that now they use ffmpeg with out fiving credit to ffmpeg. 
>>>> It's mroe thier licence is agains the LGPL in some terms.
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> which terms?
>>>   
>>>       
>> First they do not give credict as stated on the LGPL and
>>
>> 1.  GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you a restricted non-exclusive 
>> license with the following rights: Use and Copy. ViewCast grants to you 
>> the right to use copies of the ViewCast SOFTWARE PRODUCT. You may make 
>> copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT for backup and archival purposes ONLY.
>>
>>     
> [snip]
>
> It is all about how they define the 'software product'. It is actually 
> rather common for Windows software to have EULAs where 'the product' 
> means (without saying explicitly so!) the actual proprietary part, while 
> the setup also installs some 'redistributable system components' - like 
> the latest versions of some MS DLLs; without crediting the 'owner' of 
> these components, or protecting them in any way in the EULA. In short, 
> they distribute libavcodec.dll etc as if they were MS dlls. Of course we 
> (I mean the ffmpeg developpers) dont like that, but maybe they 
> (viewcast) dont know any better. Maybe we should gently explain to them 
> what the LGPL requires, before we accuse them of 'taking advantage'.
>
>