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

[Reinhard Tartler]

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.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4