@Rogue

Quote:"I bet "they" killed Kenny as well."

Let's just hope we don't hear the words of Eric, "#&*%^ you guys I'm going home."

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Piru didn't threaten Cobra. There was a discussion where people had said that he can't prove it and he did with that dump. The FAQ and doc references all came from a discussion on IRC, with ZeroHero, myself and others, where they were challenging the lawyer's claim that everything is all right. And no, it has NOTHING to do with it being OS4 software. He reacts the same way towards MorphOS software that breaches licences and I've seen it happen.
Again, it wasn't as if there wasn't any discussion about this before the email. SSolie had contacted the FSF about the matter and got an OK from one of their lawyers. He said that anyone who has any objections to this should contact the parties involved. Since there was another case of this involving Frogger (a MorphOS program), where the author forced removal of his lib from the player (it could have been worse, he could have forced a release of the sources) and since the GPL FAQ flatly contradicts what was said by the lawyer, the author was contacted. Again, this was in private, it was publicized by the author and THEN Piru came out with the mail itself.

I hate GPL's viral aspect too, but that's totally irrelevant. Since the author chose this licence, there's nothing that can be done about it, he gave away his code for use in other GPL projects, he did not give away his copyrights. Make no mistake, he would not be happy if a commercial project used his code.

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@AMiGR

Ok. Piru just posted the email on ANN which sounded like a threat.

But DVPlayer is not commercial, it's shareware. Isn't it?
I guess this does not matter with GPL?

One thing I can't understand is why DVPlayer executable has to
become GPL if the library is GPL. I can understand why the library
has to comply but not the DVPlayer main file.

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Avatar by HNL_DK!

Quote:

But DVPlayer is not commercial, it's shareware. Isn't it? I guess this does not matter with GPL?

It doesn't really matter.

Quote:

One thing I can't understand is why DVPlayer executable has to become GPL if the library is GPL. I can understand why the library has to comply but not the DVPlayer main file.

There's a term in the GPL licence under which you cannot create closed software that relies on GPL libs (unless they are part of a GPLed OS).
It defines several ways for this to happen, static linking, and dynamic linking.
The difference betwen the GPL and the LGPL licences is that the LGPL allows dynamic linking while the GPL does not, afaik (I won't pretend that I'm an expert or anything).

Now, purely from a licence point of you, DvPlayer can be considered to be infringing the licence and hence the copyrights of the author, as it's not GPL. That is an issue that has to be settled between the DvPlayer and liba52 authors. I don't think that it will have to be GPLed in the end, they will probably find another kind of settlement like removing the lib or royalties or something.

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@AMiGR

Yes, I really hope so. We need a really good media player on Amiga.
We never have had one before. Moovid never became THE player.

Btw is it possible for the DVPlayer team to get approval to use the
Liba52 code without releasing any source. Not even avcodec.library.
Does GPL allow this?

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Well, sure, if the author grants another licence for that specific use, in exchange for royalties or something, assuming that not many people have commited changes to the code (since they will all have to reply and agree). BTW, libavcodec is LGPL without libav52, so that should be the only problem.

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Looking at that email, it is adversarial, confrontational, and only barely civil.
Quote:

Refusal to comply will result in reporting the GPL License violation to copyright holder(s) of each breached component, and Free Software Foundation.

This was either an attempt to simply grab the software, "tall poppy" syndrome, or both.
If it was merely to highlight a breach of the lisence, be it intentional or not, simply informing the guy would have been enough.

This guy is nothing but a troublemaker

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@tomazkid
Quote:

Or does this mean that the money can't be drawn from the credit cards untill the GPL is solved?

It has nothing whatsoever to do with money or royalties or anything like that. The GPL is all about freedom. You can charge a million dollars a copy for GPL binaries if you want to. The point is you must give out the source code of GPL programs--or remove the GPL bits like the avcodec.library author just did.

Guess Piru will have to learn how to code his own player now...

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ExecSG Team Lead

Quote:

This guy is nothing but a troublemaker

Don't insult him with minor names... he is Piru after all...

Kuinkahan moni ymmärtää tämän vitsin?

(No offence Piru )

Last edited by tomazkid on 16-Aug-2005 at 04:10 AM.

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@ssolie

I see

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Sorry, I slipped up.

In my opinion, this guy is nothing but a troublemaker.

is that better?

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@Samwel

Quote:

But DVPlayer is not commercial, it's shareware. Isn't it? I guess this does not matter with GPL?

It does not really matter if software is commercial or shareware. GPL does not allow closed source application.

DvPlayer and avcodec is now back online.

and go and have fun now.

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@Toaks
without the AC3 decoder though.

How does one kill DVPlayer, if it freezes?
I played a 1GB movie-file I had on the harddrive, and it played nicely, untill I tried to jump forward in the movie, then it froze. (I waited 2 minutes to see if something happened)
Had to soft-reboot to kill it, which caused the partition where the file was, to be unvalidated.

Last edited by tomazkid on 16-Aug-2005 at 06:44 AM.

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@Samwel

Where in the email did he threaten the author of DVplayer ?
I read it several times and cannot find any sort of threats in it.
It's a normal email requesting the source of a GPL-based source code, dunno what was so strange about that...

develin: let it rest.

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about Piru's e-mail:

I would have used more friendly wording in the e-mail.
Otherwise it seems perfectly ok request.

To me it's not fully clear when this GPL detail is fullfilled: "free and non-free programs communicate at arms length".

Is it enough if future dvplayer comes with GPL free avcodec.library, while GPL containing avcodec.library is available elsewhere?

Last edited by KimmoK on 16-Aug-2005 at 07:05 AM.

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Quote:

It defines several ways for this to happen, static linking, and dynamic linking.

The GPL itself doesn't concern with types of linking, that's the FAQ you're talking about. All the license talks about is the concept of "derivative work", which then the FAQ elaborates on.

If you are able to builld your program or library in such a way that it's clear it's not a derivative work of the GPL part, then you're fine.

In this case, however, DVPlayer clearly depends on the shared library provided with it, which in turn has been statically linked with the GPL code - which makes it impossible to argue the library isn't a derivative work of the GPL code - hence dvplayer itself is a derivative work of the library, and thus falls under the terms of the GPL.

So, either make dvplayer not depend on that shared library by, for example, designing an uniform interface for codecs, or just don't distribute binaries of the GPL code. You can still distribute sources, of course

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@develin

I don't want to argue about this.
But check the cut Ionmane took out from the email..
The whole tone of the message was rather harsh and sarcastic
not a simple request for sources.

This is of course my opinion, maybe not yours?!

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/Harry

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Quote:

The GPL is all about freedom. [...] you must [...]

Is this really... freedom ?!

That's not what I would call "freedom"... GPL sucks, at least from that point of view.

Leo.

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