[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] avcodec: libdav1d AV1 decoder wrapper

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018, at 23:47, Rostislav Pehlivanov wrote:
> Given the license difference, the preference of everyone involved with it

How can you speak for "everyone involved"? Don't speak for other, please.

> for LGPL (its only BSD and a separate library because money) I think

It's BSD because we want everyone to use, because we want the AV1 format to be successful.
And AV1 can only be successful if you have good decoders, until the hardware decoders arrive (2 years).
The same reasoning is why rav1e is BSD.

Having a BSD licensed library makes sense, like for libopus, libvorbis and so on, in these cases, where you want your format to be popular.
Even RMS agrees...

It's a separate library to avoid the VP9 issue where people refused to use ffvp9 because of the size of the library, and kept using libvpx, or their fork of libvpx.

> chances are people/companies will sooner abandon it to work on their fork
> than use the base version as-is (or in case of companies contribute).

If people fork without contributing, it's probably because it does not fit their use case.
It's not going to be because of the speed, because de facto, this community makes things fast.
It's a decoder, not something where you can have a strategic advantage (a contrario from encoders).

Also, you know, the world has moved on, from the 90s/2000s.
People understand now the cost of maintenance of software, and the cost of forking.
Microsoft contributes .Net as MIT, Google and Microsoft work together on numerous frameworks, most go, js, python projects are licensed under MIT/BSD, and they still have thousand of contributors, not people forking all the time.

The reason is because the money is on services, not just software.

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf -  President
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