[FFmpeg-devel] FFMpeg GPL license Violations by Android apps

[riya khanna]

AFAIK, all Android apps are executed under Java runtime virtual machine
sandbox (they cannot fork and start a new process). All shared libraries
shipped with app installation packages (e..g, libffmpeg.so) are loaded
dynamically from Java runtime using the JNI interface into the host process
address space.

We found LGPL variants of ffmpeg being used in apps as well. However, our
system currently lacks the capability to detect if such libraries have been
modified in any way to flag them as derivate works (under section 2
LGPL2.1). This is a WIP.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
FSFPolice

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 5:09 PM, Aaron Levinson <alevinsn at aracnet.com>
wrote:

> On 5/15/2017 1:48 PM, riya khanna wrote:
>
>> We built a system to match mobile app binaries against an indexing
>> database
>> of signatures extracted across various popular OSS sources (e.g., ffmpeg).
>> We should be able to share a draft of our design and implementation with
>> you soon. Thanks!
>>
>
> You indicated that each of these projects uses a GPL build of FFmpeg. Are
> they linking to a GPL build of FFmpeg for Android or are they merely
> shipping binaries and invoking the ffmpeg binary as a separate process? Or
> perhaps they have extracted source code from FFmpeg, whether licensed under
> the GPL or the LGPL, and are using that in their own project, which would
> also generally violate the terms of the GPL and/or LGPL. However, if they
> are using the approach of just launching ffmpeg in a separate process, I
> think that in general doesn't violate the GPL as long as it is clear where
> to get the source code that was used to build the FFmpeg binaries that were
> shipped with the app.
>
> Aaron Levinson
>
>
> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 1:38 PM, Kieran Kunhya <kierank at obe.tv> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Out of interest, how did you automate this process? Is it as simple as
>>> looking for the FFmpeg configure string?
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Kieran Kunhya
>>>
>>> On Mon, 15 May 2017 at 16:36 riya khanna <riyakhanna1983 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Typo: We have inspected *1.6 million free* Google Playstore Android apps
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 11:24 AM, riya khanna <riyakhanna1983 at gmail.com
>>>> >
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Please find the list of apps here:
>>>>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YnBHbsYIyGxQbjpaIbU4LFjha3hx8
>>>>> 3ciKLk7htVjpT4/edit?usp=sharing
>>>>>
>>>>> We have inspected 1.6 free Google Playstore Android apps and found over
>>>>> 4,300 apps violating GPL 2 or 3 (--enable-gpl) licensing terms.
>>>>>
>>>>> Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks!
>>>>>
>>>>> -FSFPolice
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 11:33 AM, Carl Eugen Hoyos <ceffmpeg at gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 2017-05-11 15:55 GMT+02:00 riya khanna <riyakhanna1983 at gmail.com>:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We are a group of PhD students at Georgia Tech carrying out a
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> research
>>>
>>>> project that explores free software violations by mobile apps. We
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> found
>>>>
>>>>> that over 100 Android apps use GPL version of FFMpeg.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> We can share a list of all the apps if you are interested in
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> details.
>>>
>>>> Please let us know.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You could send the list to this mailing list.
>>>>>> (Please do not open 100 tickets on our bug tracker.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There's really not much we can do, Carl Eugen
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
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