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

[Benoit Bolsee]

A bit of history..

Between April 2008 and March 2009 I was the maintainer for the FFmpeg
Windows DLL. I've provided the DLL from Blender releases 2.46 up to 2.49
RC. It was necessary to do a custom build because of some patches that
were needed for Blender and not yet included in the official FFmpeg
repository. During this period, I included libfaac without knowing that
it would create a license conflict of course. Here is the configure
command that I used:

./configure --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-memalign-hack
--extra-ldflags=-L/shared/lib --extra-cflags=-I/shared/include
--enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libx264
--enable-gpl --enable-libxvid --disable-ffplay --disable-ffserver
--enable-zlib

After that, the patches were finally accepted by FFmpeg development team
and we started to use the automatic build provided by
http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org
My custom build was probably used for some 2.49 RC releases but
certainly not for the official 2.49b

Is it possible that Carl stumbled on an old or mixed-up package? My
build was based on FFmpeg revision 17993.

/benoit

On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:50:10 +0100, Leo Sutic <leo.sutic at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 
> Carl and everyone else,
> 
> I've done some checking of the FFmpeg integration in Blender 2.49b.
> 
> I came up with the following:
> 
> I can confirm that the default configuration for compiling 
> FFmpeg into Blender has --enable-gpl set and no 
> --enable-nonfree. So it *ought* to be all right.
> 
> It is linked against libfaad, but I find no trace of libfaac 
> in the dll. For example, the string "faac: codec init failed" 
> is in the dll, but that's from libfaad (libfaad.c), which 
> does not link to libfaac, as far as I know. In libfaac.c, the 
> FFmpeg interface to libfaac, are the strings "wrong libfaac 
> version" and  "libfaac AAC (Advanced Audio Codec)", neither 
> of which can be found in avcodec-52.dll. Unless these strings 
> are stored somewhere else, shouldn't they be present if 
> libfaac.o is linked in?
> 
> I am really unfamiliar with the FFmpeg codebase, so I don't 
> know what the significance of the above is. Carl, could you 
> give me some guidance as to what to look for to confirm the 
> existence / absence of libfaac code in the dll? Basically, 
> what did you see?
> 
> /LS
> 
> On 2011-01-06 17:41, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> > 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
> > 
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