[MPlayer-dev-eng] Relicensing MPlayer or parts of it to LGPL

[Roberto Togni]

On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 15:47:48 +0100
wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:

[...]
> 
Hi

> To avoid this, I'm thinking of relicensing mpv to LGPL 2.1 (with the 
> "or later"). While many things have changed in mpv compared to MPlayer
> (and many parts have been rewritten or removed), much of its core is
> still based on MPlayer, and I need agreement from the original authors
> of the code.
> 
Do you have a list of the files that have to be relicensed?
This would be a good starting point to understand what we're talking
about.
Did you forked mpv from MPlayer or mplayer2 repository?

The only reliable way to get a list of all contributor for MPlayer
files is to go over every commit message (CVS and SVN does not keep
track of contributions committed by others), and also check all replies
to the commit on the cvslog mailing list (sometime we forgot to add the
original author to the commit message, and commented it in a reply on
cvslog).
Also beware that many people (me included) changed username in the
transition from CVS to SVN; also email addresses changed over the
years (I used at least 3 emails since I started contributing).

Surely you have a huge task in front of you.

> I'm thinking it would be beneficial for MPlayer as well to relicense
> parts to LGPL (or all of it, if enough contributors can be reached).
> Alternatively, I'd just ask for permission to relicense the affected
> source files in mpv.
> 
I don't think that relicensing the complete MPlayer is something doable
with a reasonable effort (for my understanding of reasonable, others
may disagree).
It's a big codebase with 15 years of history, and there are also files
ported from other projects.
I'm not against it, but I won't be the one doing it.

We didn't even relicensed the filters ported from MPlayer to FFmpeg (I
don't remember if there was a clear opposition, or it was just never
tried).


> Would there be any welcoming or opposing to such a move from MPlayer
> developers?

You can use my code from MPlayer in mvp under LGPL 2.1 or later (I
already relicensed most of it anyway when the codecs were moved from
MPlayer to FFmpeg).


Ciao,
 Roberto