[FFmpeg-devel] full swscale relicensing to LGPL

[Robert Swain]

On 23/3/09 03:10, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 08:58:46PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> A company is apparently offering 20KEUR to have all of swscale relicensed
>> under LGPL.
>
> This is apparently false, they changed the offer.

They changed it or their was confusion? In any case, the money is still 
welcome.

> They dont need swscale, rather they want to donate to the main developers,
> without any specific development request or focus.

Cool!

> They also want to know how to get off the hall of shame

For this we need to know how we are and have contact with them so that 
we can advise them as to what they're doing wrong.

> As iam neither "the main developers" (iam a single person last i checked)
> and iam not maintainer of the hall of shame i cant really accept their
> offer, nor help them.

You are the main developer and project leader. I was certainly happy for 
you to receive all of the 20k EUR if no one else with a claim wanted any 
of it, and for you to do with it as you pleased. Giving you 20k EUR is 
like giving FFmpeg 20k EUR. If it helps you to work on FFmpeg, I have no 
problem with you having all the money.

If we are to give it to 'the main developers' we would have to figure 
out how to decide who that group are - whether just the top four 
committers (as I recall Michael, Diego, Baptiste and M?ns had 
significantly more commits than any other committers for the past 6 
months) or all committers.

If the conduct of the GPL to LGPL relicensing is anything to go by, 
maybe it should be offered proportionally to all committers with their 
portion of the money being dealt with as each committer requests. Else I 
would be happy to see it go into an FFmpeg pot as suggested below.

We can all help them if they contact us. Else put them in contact with 
Diego about licensing issues. Without knowing who they are, we can't 
advise them as to what they're doing wrong. They should feel shame for 
not resolving the license violation, which is the purpose of the Hall of 
Shame but, they should not feel shame for contacting us publicly to 
resolve the license violation as it is a positive step.

> If their new offer is serious, maybe someone with thicker skin wants
> to contact them and claim that 20k for ffmpeg and use it for something
> like bounties for specific tasks.

That would be great, but I've wanted a donation pot for a while. If the 
money goes to a central FFmpeg pot, we'd probably have to register as a 
non-profit organisation or something. This would be a very nice first 
donation.

> My offer to relicense my code in libswscale to LGPL still stands
> and i suspects kostyas to rewrite yuv2rgb_template.c too.

I'm sure this would be welcomed by commercially interested FFmpeg 
supporters and should be an example of how FFmpeg welcomes commercial 
support through donations/sponsorship for us to be able to direct (more 
of) our time to FFmpeg development. We all need our bread money.

Regards,
Rob