Comment 0 for bug 374900

Binary package hint: faac

From: Jason Garrett-Glaser <email address hidden>
Subject: [RFC] Libfaac not LGPL?
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel
To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <email address hidden>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:45:37 -0700
Reply-To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches
 <email address hidden>

We had some discussions on #ffmpeg-devel and I asked the folks at #gnu
about this:

http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faac/libfaac/tns.c?r1=1.8&r2=1.9

It appears that libfaac, despite declaring itself LGPL2.1, contains
quite a few licenses... many of which are completely incompatible with
the LGPL, such as the above.

In theory, it still may be legal to distribute, as the LGPL linking
exception *may* cover the linking of .c files with non-free licenses
with .c files that have free licenses. However, either way, this
places FAAC squarely under non-GPL territory... such that ffmpeg
should require --enable-nonfree to link to it.

See thread at http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/89985