Bug#582274: Isn't VP8 released as BSD?

[Nathan A. Stine]

On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 08:51 +0200, Sebastian Dröge wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 23:10 -0400, Nathan A. Stine wrote:
> > Or so I thought.
> > 
> > Diego Biurrun marked it as non-free upstream, but I'd think Debian Legal
> > should take a look at the license to make their own determination.
> 
> Well, it's IMHO not non-free (as in not DFSG free) but it's definitely
> GPLv2 incompatible because of the restriction in the patent license
> (interesting here: if they didn't include a patent license nobody
> would've complained although they had no official rights to use the
> patents...). If your software is (L)GPLv2+ or v3 I guess everything is
> fine, if it's LGPLv2 it's probably fine too.
> 
> But you're right, Debian Legal should probably look at it as well. I've
> already asked the ftp-masters to give their statement about the license
> and compatibility with other licenses but they didn't answer yet.

FFmpeg states that it is available under (L)GPL2+.  I suppose if the
license does meet muster, adding VP8 support would necessarily mean that
the entire work would be LGPLv2+ or GPLv3.  I wouldn't see how that is a
problem.  We could just add another build option --enable-gplv3 and put
libvpx under it as we do with swscale.

Nathan A. Stine