Dear libav developers, as some of you already know, I have been trying for a few months now to organize a sponsored relicensing of the yadif deinterlacing filter from GPL to LGPL. Its main author is Michael Niedermayer but there are commits with contributions from 19 other developers, some of them from mplayer times, some from the time it was ported to fffmpeg and some from after the libav/ffmpeg split on both sides.
When I offered some money for the relicensing on behalf of my company, Michael told me that there were other offers and that I could coordinate that, if I wanted to help, since he was too busy working on other ffmpeg things, so I volunteered for that, to make it more likely that the relicensing would succeed. After a lot of emailing regarding process and legal stuff and some lobbying the total offer by the interested companies landed at 18075 Euro. The proposal was to split the money as follows: 7000 goes to the main author Michael 1500 go to each of the major contributors Baptiste Coudurier, Anton Khirnov, Loren Merritt, James Darnley and Daniel Kang The remaining 3575 are donated to the ffmpeg project via SPI and will serve for stuff like fate hardware, travel expenses etc.. It was criticized that I only posted this on ffmpeg-devel and CCd the contributors who I had not seen on that ML for a long time and generally focussed only on the ffmpeg project thus implicitly favoring ffmpeg over libav. Let me state this here that this is neither meant to be about ffmpeg vs. libav politics nor an expression of lack of appreciation of the work done in this project here. It simply happened this way because all of the sponsors use the code from the ffmpeg project and contacted their project lead, Michael. Nevertheless, the criticism is justified and I agree, I should have addressed the libav developer community directly, just as I did with the ffmpeg community. If the trenches between the projects weren't that deep (which IMHO is more than regrettable), I would normally assume that one side always benefits from good things on the other side (I know that ffmpeg merges a lot more from libav than vice versa but I would expect that the fixes and features that are merged from ffmpeg are still appreciated here) and sponsorship for one project is seen as a good thing by the other but looking at the history of the situation I understand, that this view is not shared by everyone. I know I have stepped on people's toes with this and I am sorry about that. I don't know if I will ever volunteer again to do a similar thing after this but if I do, I will try to be more cautious with these things next time. I have no close ties with anyone in either project. I am merely a long-time ffmpeg (library) user trying to both benefit and be a good FOSS citizen by giving back a bit. So far 18 of the 20 contributors have agreed, so it might actually happen. Best regards, Robert _______________________________________________ libav-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libav.org/mailman/listinfo/libav-devel
