[vlc-devel] FAAD License...

[Gildas Bazin]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 07:40 +0200, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> As you may, or may not know, FAAD's license was bad, and according to
> specialist made it incompatible with the GPL, for v2.5.
> 
> According to FSF, FAAD 2.6 is GPL compatible, but, asks to add a display
> in the about boxes of the program, and is considered "as clarification of
> section 2c of the GPLv2"
> 
> What we could do, while waiting for a competing decoder, is add this
> necessary info in THANKS, as we do for :
> "
> VLC makes extensive use of the following persons' code:
> 
> Aaron Holtzman <aholtzma at ess.engr.uvic.ca> - AC3 decoder, MPEG video
> decoder
> Michel Lespinasse <walken at zoy.org> - AC3 decoder, MPEG audio and
> video decoders
> "
> 

This section is probably not valid anymore. I believe it dates back from
the days where VLC had its own AC3 and MPEG1/2 decoders which where
based on (or using) code from Aaron and Michel.

However these don't exist anymore since we now use third party libraries
for that (liba52 and libmpeg2).

Maybe it would make sense to add a kind of contribs section in the
THANKS file instead. And then every external library we use would have
the thanks it deserves.

--
Gildas