[Bf-committers] Fwd: Copyright violation distributing faac binaries together with GPL software

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi devs,

Please advise. I recall libavcodec is quite old already, and probably  
obsolete mostly because of FFmpg?

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Carl Eugen Hoyos
> Date: 6 January, 2011 17:15:37 GMT+01:00
> To: foundation at blender.org
> Subject: Copyright violation distributing faac binaries together  
> with GPL software
>
> Hi!
>
> I am an FFmpeg developer and I just found out that Blender binaries  
> are distributed containing GPL'd versions of libavcodec linked  
> against non-free software (this is a copyright violation).
>
> I don't know where to report this (should I open a bug report?), so  
> I write to the only email adress I easily found on the web-site.
>
> I downloaded blender-2.49b-windows, it contains libavcodec.dll, a  
> binary distribution of libavcodec. The dll contains code from x264,  
> making it GPL (and not LGPL). It also contains code from the libfaac  
> project.
> Originally, libfaac claimed to be free software (under the LGPL),  
> but unfortunately, this was never true: libfaac is (and always has  
> been) proprietary software.
> Since you cannot fulfill the requirements of the GPL for libfaac,  
> you cannot distribute a GPL'd version of libavcodec with libfaac  
> support enabled. Please remove it from your download page / update  
> your libavcodec version.
>
> Thank you, Carl Eugen Hoyos