[FFmpeg-devel] Cleanup libswscale and reimplement GPL code under LGPL

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 04:59:01PM +0200, Luca Abeni wrote:
> Hi Ramiro,
> 
> Ramiro Polla wrote:
> >> IMO rewriting the SIMD code because of GPL makes no sense, why would you
> >> want to do that? The code can be used without SIMD, is it so bad that
> >> non free software will be a little slower?
> >> Also i will not review any rewritten SIMD code.
> > 
> > Ok, but what about the rest of the project? Instead of rewriting SIMD
> > code, cleanly #ifdef'ing it so that swscaler can be the default scaler,
> 
> I think the SIMD code is already #ifdef'ed (I do not know if it is
> cleanly #ifdef'ed or not, this depends on how you define "cleanly" :).
> Compiling only the non-SIMD code is quite easy.
> 
> The problem is that the non-SIMD code (which is mainly LGPLed) depends
> on some conversion tables which are generated by GPLed code. So,
> libswscale depends on "--enable-gpl". To make the LGPLed code really
> useful without "--enable-gpl", you have to re-implement the lookup tables
> generator and release it under LGPL.

> I think Michael agrees that re-implementing the tables generator makes
> sense (and I apologize if I misunderstood this).

yes, but IMHO that is a little weak for a whole summer ...
Also what about politely asking walken to relicense the generator code
under LGPL?

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

Many things microsoft did are stupid, but not doing something just because
microsoft did it is even more stupid. If everything ms did were stupid they
would be bankrupt already.
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