[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Abuse on the ApplicationCatalog page

[From: Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 14:22 +0300, Jussi Kukkonen wrote:
> Hi Ted,
> Could you set your mail program to use some kind of quoting, like ">"?
> Reading your response is quite difficult.
> 
> Ted Teah wrote:
> > If you download the trial and extract the software in the installer run
> > stings | grep copyright on the dll's and you will see results for HP,
> > reference to the GPL and ffmpeg.  For any one this is to complex for I
> > will send you the results of these commands.  I don't think that maemo
> > should encourage the violation of the license which is the foundation
> > for the FOSS world.    
> > 
> 
> ffmpeg itself is totally LGPL. So, using unmodified ffmpeg library in a
> proprietary application, without releasing any source, is fine.
>  Of course this doesn't mean there aren't other license problems with
> the "Nokia" Media Studio, but let's be sure before accusing anyone...

This is very inaccurate and your description would be more true of a
BSD/MIT licensed library. LGPL actually have a lot of terms coming with
it when being bundled with an application like this.  There are rules
about giving clear notice with your application that a LGPL library is
used. You need to provide anyone getting your application the source or
the option to get *your* copy of the source of the LGPL code. Many
people let this mean 'pointing to the upstream source', but the LGPL
doesn't really allow for this.

There are also relatively strict rules about static linking if I
remember correctly and there are of course the patent/license conflicts
in part of the world. 

Might be that they have all these issues covered correctly, I haven't
looked into it myself, but I am a bit skeptical of it.

Christian