[vlc-devel] [vlc-commits] contrib: FreeType: require GPL

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le 26 septembre 2017 09:38:23 GMT+03:00, Steve Lhomme <robux4 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>Should we add a libvlc entry to retrieve all the mandatory licensing
>text that comes with a particular setup of libvlc ? Fetching the text
>from each lib.
>
>On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 12:53 AM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org>
>wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On Mon, 25 Sep 2017, at 20:31, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>>> So unless you patch the LibVLC app to advertise FreeType, the only
>option
>>> is GPL, IIUC.
>>
>>> If somebody really knows what s/he is doing, i.e. actually adds the
>>> advertisement clause in his/her non-GPL app, s/he can manually
>revert
>>> this  patch in his/her downstream LibVLC fork. That does not sound
>like a safe
>>> assumption in upstream IMO.
>>
>> This is a bit problematic, tbh, for most of the users of libVLC, that
>> need to display text...
>>
>> --
>> Jean-Baptiste Kempf -  President
>> +33 672 704 734
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That can't work. Licenses change are not synched with API changes. And the VLC FT plugin does not know if it is used as GPL or FTL. Likewise, some people may build LibVLC  (or use an existing build) as GPL, then rip out the GPL bits.

Also advertisement typically would need to be shown also in associated docs, where you won't get to make an API call.

From my PoV, 4-clauses BSD and the likes are unusable unless the final packagers review their licensing terms. That is Due Diligence. However it is our moral and possibly legal duty to help them not accidentally violate copyrights.

tl;dr: the only viable (to me) options are what we have now (manual patching), or adding a disabled by default --enable-adv-clause to bootstrap.
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