License impact of opencore-amr and vo-aacenc/amrwbenc

[MJ Ray]

Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com>
> [Posting this again to debian-legal, as suggested by Jonas. Keeping 
> pkg-multimedia and pkg-gstreamer in CC for this initial mail, but 
> please keep replying to -legal. Sorry for the inconvenience!]

I'm confused by the above, so I'm keeping all the CCs.

> [...], but according to their respective debian/copyright 
> files, the packages are still released under the terms of the GPL-2+. 
> Is this simply an oversight and should get changed to GPL-3?

As I understand it (IANAL), no: the sources are still GPL-2+
because they don't contain anything requiring them to change.

> For the same reason we have a libav-extra package in Debian which 
> provides a libavcodec library linked against the aforementioned 
> libraries. According to its debian/copyright file, the GPL-3 applies 
> to the resulting binary packages. What does this mean for packages 
> linking against this variant of libavcodec? What are the exact license 
> incompatibilities that we want to avoid by providing this variant? 

I think that is best asked of its Maintainer.

> Does this mean that a package which is licensed under GPL-2 (not 2+) 
> cannot get linked against the GPL-3'ed libavcodec?

Yes, that's what it means.

Source: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility

    Is GPLv3 compatible with GPLv2? (#v2v3Compatibility)

	No. Some of the requirements in GPLv3, such as the requirement
	to provide Installation Information, do not exist in GPLv2. As
	a result, the licenses are not compatible: if you tried to
	combine code released under both these licenses, you would
	violate section 6 of GPLv2.

Hope that informs,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct