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

[Nathan A. Stine]

On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 18:10 +0200, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> On Do, Jun 03, 2010 at 16:22:28 (CEST), Nathan A. Stine wrote:
> 
> > 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+.
> 
> the debian FFmpeg package is distributed under *GPL2*. We do enable
> important parts (e.g., in libswscale) that are not enable in LGPL mode.
> GPL3 would make linking other GPL2 only packages problematic.
> 
> In theory, I guess we could provide an additional LGPL only variant of
> ffmpeg in some special, non-standard path, but I'm not convinced at all
> that this will a) helping here and b) worth the trouble.

Luckily Google has revised their license[1].  It seems this change has
addressed all concerns of GPLv2 incompatibility.  The license for libvpx
is now a simple BSD and the patent grant is separate.  It also clears up
the confusion over whether or not the patient grant still holds up if
the code is modified.  It does.

I would think this would be enough to include this in ffmpeg upstream
and part of Debian main.

[1]http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-webm-open-source-license.html

Best regards,

Nathan A. Stine