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

[Reuben Martin]

On Thursday, January 06, 2011, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi devs,
> 
> Please advise. I recall libavcodec is quite old already, and probably  
> obsolete mostly because of FFmpg?
> 
> -Ton-
> 
> > 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
> >
> > 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.

I'm not sure where he is getting this from. There is no libfaac dll shipped in the zip archive, and the dll deos not appear to be statically linked with libfaac.


reuben at subterfuge ~ $ strings avcodec-52.dll | grep aac
aac_main
aac_low
aac_ssr
aac_ltp
Read beyond end of ff_aac_codebook_vectors[%d][]. index %d >= %d
jaac
faacDecInit2 failed r:%d   sr:%ld  ch:%ld  s:%d
faac: codec init failed.
faac: frame decoding failed: %s
aac_adtstoasc
aac_adtstoasc_bsf
aac_decoder
aac_encoder
aac_parser
ff_aac_ac3_parse
ff_aac_codebook_vectors
ff_aac_coders
ff_aac_kbd_long_1024
ff_aac_kbd_short_128
ff_aac_num_swb_1024
ff_aac_num_swb_128
ff_aac_parse_header
ff_aac_pow2sf_tab
ff_aac_pred_sfb_max
ff_aac_psy_model
ff_aac_scalefactor_bits
ff_aac_scalefactor_code
ff_aac_spectral_bits
ff_aac_spectral_codes
ff_aac_spectral_sizes

I believe all of those strings are comming from the ffmpeg codebase.

On _MY_ system where I compiled ffmpeg with libfaac:

reuben at subterfuge ~ $ less /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.52

Dynamic section at offset 0x69e848 contains 47 entries:
  Tag        Type                         Name/Value
[ ... ]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libfaac.so.0] 

-Reuben