[FFmpeg-devel] Licensing issue with idct_mmx.c

[Alexandre Colucci]

On 5 avr. 2011, at 20:08, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:

> On 4/5/11, Alexandre Colucci <alexandre at elgato.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The file idct_mmx.c (libavcodec/x86/idct_mmx.c) has a GPL license which
>> conflicts with the rest of the libavcodec files.
>> This file is apparently not used anywhere.
>> 
>> Is this file really needed (mmx is an old architecture)? Would it be
>> possible to change the license to LGPL or move it outside of libavcodec?
>> The presence of the GPL license forces the client of the libavcodec to
>> manually remove the file, instead of using libavcodec as is.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Alexandre
> 
> 
> If you take a look of the Makefile in the same directory,
> you will see that this file is compiled only when CONFIG-GPL is enabled.
> 
> The function from this file is used in dsputil_mmx.c for the
> ff_libmpeg2_mmx_idct* functions. The code there is also under
> CONFIG_GPL condition.
> 
> 
> So if you haven't configure --enable-gpl, your build would not contain
> that code.


GPL is disable so my binary doesn't contain this code. But the fact that a file containing GPL source code (even if not compiled) is in my repository sounds like a major licensing issue to me. Each time I sync my libavcodec folder, I have to manually delete the file idct_mmx.c.

Alexandre