Hi, This is very confusing information.
First: talk to Audacity if you want to know their reasoning to not include (parts of) FFMpeg, then decide then your own stance. Second: Blender Foundation sees no problem distributing FFMpeg with Blender as we do now. If we get reports or evidence we're violating the law, I'll investigate that. Third: such legal investigations and discussions then will happen in private. No reason to feed the (patent) trolls more. Fourth: if you develop and distribute code under GPL (which you have to, it uses Blender), you can get legal advice from FSF and softwarefreedom.org. -Ton- -------------------------------------------------------- Ton Roosendaal - [email protected] - www.blender.org Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute Entrepotdok 57A - 1018AD Amsterdam - The Netherlands On 24 Mar, 2014, at 4:42, Garrett Williams wrote: > I'm working on a custom version of Blender and intend to distribute > it. Since Audacity can't include ffmpeg due to software patents, this > gives me concern about including ffmpeg with my distribution of > Blender. Playing videos is crucial for my purposes, especially in the > game engine. Likewise, exporting videos is potentially crucial. > Does Blender do something special with ffmpeg to prevent patent > issues, besides the foundation being based in Europe? I live in the > United States, which makes me very wary of software patents. I'm > probably even over-concerned about making a feature that looks > anything like what somebody might have a patent on. Not sure if just > hosting the site in Europe would provide any legal protection. > I should add that my distribution is designed to compete with > Powerpoint, so I wouldn't want any easy targets for their legal > department if Blendshow(my distribution) becomes successful. I think > LibreOffice Impress implements ffmpeg in a similar way, so maybe I'm > just looking too deep into Audacity's reasoning for not including it. > > Pre-emptive acknowledgement of disclaimers: I understand that most > likely none of you are lawyers and I should pay a lawyer more than I > have if I expect a reliable answer. > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
