[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] News: Removal of libndi

[Nicolas George]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf (12019-03-20):
> 2) Both of those are addressing drivers for actual cards. 
> So we're not talking about userland, but accessing drivers which are
> part of the OS, and are therefore exempted by the GPL.

I am not sure I agree with that interpretation. The wording is quite
obscure, even for legalese, but the way I understand it, a library is a
system library if, when somebody uses that particular operating system,
we can be sure they have that library.

It is not relevant for drivers, because drivers are not called directly,
they are called by the kernel, and applications only call standard
kernel interfaces. If some piece of hardware requires a library to be
used, that library is not really a driver, and it does not count as a
system library.

That is my interpretation. Furthermore, the wording makes the case of
system libraries an exception to the general rune, and AFAIK, in legal
documents, exceptions are supposed to be interpreted in a very narrow
way.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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