[FFmpeg-devel] Searching for a ffmpeg BCLO (bastard chief legal officer)

[Chris Ribe]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 03:31:45PM -0400, Chris Ribe wrote:
>  > >
>  > > There is one more thing you should point out, though: It needs to be
>  > > clear which version of FFmpeg he is using and what changes he did make,
>  > > if any.  This is the part that may be interesting to us, there is the
>  > > chance that some of his changes could be useful.
>  >
>  > Alright, I add the following and sent the letter:
>
>  Did you send off the letter already?
>

I did send the letter, and I received a positive response to it on
Saturday.   I just sent an acknowledgment of his response.  This
raises the question of where to copy the correspondence.  Should I cc
correspondence to this list?  Should I copy it to the issue tracker?
Should I just summarize the correspondence on the issue tracker?


>
>  I should note here that regarding the changes made to the source code
>  it's more important to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the
>  license.  The idea is that is should be possible (and ideally simple) to
>  find out what was changed and how.
>
>  Having each file contain a changelog is a possible solution, but not
>  very practical.  A public revision control system is a good solution, as
>  would be a clear statement which version/revision the code is derived
>  from and one or multiple diff files.

While this would be nice, and certainly worth asking for, I can't read
the L/GPL as requiring it.  It seems to me that we should be careful
to distinguish between things license violators must do, and things we
would like them to do.

-chris

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