As a practical matter, you might want to investigate how other commercial video software for Linux handles licensing. One program I can think of offhand is the editor MainActor; no doubt a Google search, or a look at the large video-processing Web sites, will turn up others. I'm only guessing here, but I would imagine they have found and licensed, or written themselves, non-GPL'd libraries they provide the functionality they needed, and perhaps they can steer you to appropriate ones (or license them to you, if they wrote them).
Another option is to purchase a non-GPL license for avifile from its authors. I don't know if this is practical (that is, I don't know how many authors avifile has) or if the developers as a group would even be interested in offering you this option. But the GPL certainly appears to allow developers also to license under other terms, and I know that some developers of other programs and libraries have used this dual-licensing approach in the past. Once again, you'll need a lawyer's advice on the details.
If you read the materials at the Free Software Foundation site, you will appreciate that, at least for some people involved with the GPL, the *intent* of that license was to make it difficult for closed-source (or what they call "non-free") applications to make any use of GPL'd software. Your closing comment should be considered in that context ... at least for some, it would not be "a pity" at all if the GPL were to interfere with your goals ... particularly if the interference were limited to making it impossible for you to use their work in a commercial product without paying them for it.
At 12:10 PM 12/11/02 +0100, Torsten Blank wrote:
Dear avifile-developers, we develop a commercial (closed source) 3D-application parallel for Linux and Windows. One of its features is the mapping of an AVI to polygons. Its not a key feature, but it looks nice. For Windows it was no problem to implement it, using the AVIStream-function-family of the Windows SDK.But, my job is to do it for Linux. In the state of development i have used the avifile library, which easily works. Now, we cannot distribute our AVI-reader-plugin, as avifile stands under the GPL, which forbid it, even linked as an optional plugin, as i have read recently. So, my question is: do you see a possibility to implement this sort of AVI-support for Linux in a simple way. Is there a free or commercial library which i can use to do something like that: - Open an AVI-file - Test if it can be read - Get frame number <something> as a bitmap - Get frame number <something> as a bitmap - Get frame number <something> as a bitmap ... - Close the AVI-file I hope you can, and will help me, although i am developping a commercial product. It would be a pity, if i had to arrive at the conclusion that the AVI-support is not possible in the Linux-version of our product.
-- -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"-------- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Avifile mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://prak.org/mailman/listinfo/avifile
