[FFmpeg-devel] Possible violation of FFmpeg's license by Transgaming's Cider

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 02:20:28PM +0100, Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I stumbled through this yesterday, it might be of interest to you guys,
> but I'm not a lawyer, so it might be all right and just being me
> thinking negatively.
> 
> I bought a copy of Command & Conquer 3 for Mac; the game has been ported
> to Mac by Transgaming (of Cedega fame), through their Cider toolkit
> (which is probably just based on Cedega itself, although I admit I don't
> know enough of that).
> 
> On the game's manual, there is a list of copyright holders, many Free
> Software projects are listed, including libpng, libjpeg, cg toolkit,
> dmalloc, SDL, bstring, iniparser, Squish of course ReWind and Wine, but
> also FFmpeg:
> 
> "The Cider libquartz.dylib component includes portions of ffmpeg,
> Copyright (C) 2000-2006 Fabrice Bellard, et al."
> 
> I do have libquartz.dylib on the DVD, but I can't find any copy of the
> LGPL license nor the corresponding source code on either the DVD or the
> manual, nor I find a written offer to send me the source code.
> 
> The only reference to source code is at the end of the page:
> 
> "Source code to the LGPL components is available via CVS access through:
> http:/transgaming.org/cvs/".
> 
> I'm not sure if that is enough to be compliant with LGPL license, as if
> I recall correctly you need to provide the source code, or a written
> offer, together with the binary form.

Personally i dont mind how source is provided as long as it is in a reasonable
way ...
but, when i click on:
"CVS download instructions" i reach a page telling me
"You must read this carefully and agree to it all before you can download the software on this site. "
I dont have to agree to the LGPL or any of the other hundread licenses
on that page. This does not exempt them from the requirement of providing
the source to me (if i had the binary that is)!

oddly viewcvs is not behind such clickthrough, but i failed to find any
ffmpeg code in there, anyone knows in which directory/file it is?

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness. -- Aristotle
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