mpv/Copyright

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mpv is a fork of mplayer2, which is a fork of MPlayer.
mpv as a whole is licensed under the GNU General Public License GPL version 2
or later (called GPLv2+ in this document, see LICENSE.GPL for full license
text) by default, or the GNU Lesser General Public License LGPL version 2 or
later (LGPLv2.1+ in this document, see LICENSE.LGPL for full license text) if
built with the --enable-lgpl configure switch.
Most source files are LGPLv2.1+ or GPLv2+, but some files are available under
more liberal licenses, such as BSD, MIT, ISC, and possibly others. Look at the
copyright header of each source file, and grep the sources for "Copyright" if
you need to know details. C source files without Copyright notice are usually
licensed as LGPLv2.1+. Also see the list of files with specific licenses below
(not all files can have a standard license header).
build: make LGPL mode final (via --enable-gpl) Rename --enable-preliminary-lgpl2 to --enable-gpl. This concludes the relicensing. Some things are still to do (relicensing some still-GPL optional code), but we consider the code included by --enable-gpl to be fully relicensed. The relicensing was performed by asking every known author for permission for relicensing it to LGPL version 2.1 "or later". If an author could not be contacted or permission could not be obtained, and the contribution was considered relevant for copyright purposes, the affected code was either excluded from LGPL mode (not built), or removed or rewritten. This is the standard in open source relicensing processes. Keep in mind that using LGPL mode is still on the user's own risk. Even though I claim that the relicensing was pretty clean and thorough (measured on the standards of the open source community¹), and I followed the advice of some actual experts, there is still a residual uncertainty due to the fact that I'm not an all-knowing entity (authors could have taken someone else's code and pretend it's their own) nor a lawyer (meaning I might lack associated authority or expertise), and the fact that the judicial system is far from deterministic. The relicensing was performed merely to the best of my knowledge. I reject all responsibility outside of that. This commit also cleans up the "Copyright" file to reflect the finalized relicensing process. ¹ Not to imply that the standards of commercial companies are much higher. Some major tech companies get away with stuff I would not consider clean. See #2033.
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All new contributions must be LGPLv2.1+ licensed. Using a more liberal license
compatible to LGPLv2.1+ is also ok.
2018-01-31 02:50:22 +00:00
Changes done to GPL code must come with the implicit/explicit agreement that the
project can relicense the changes to LGPLv2.1+ at a later point without asking
the contributor. This is a safeguard for making potential relicensing of
remaining GPL code to LGPLv2.1+ easier.
See DOCS/contribute.md for binding rules wrt. licensing for contributions.
For information about authors and contributors, consult the git log, which
contains the complete SVN and CVS history as well.
"v2.1+" in this context means "version 2.1 or later".
Some libraries are GPLv2+ or GPLv3+ only. Building mpv with Samba support makes
it GPLv3+.
build: make LGPL mode final (via --enable-gpl) Rename --enable-preliminary-lgpl2 to --enable-gpl. This concludes the relicensing. Some things are still to do (relicensing some still-GPL optional code), but we consider the code included by --enable-gpl to be fully relicensed. The relicensing was performed by asking every known author for permission for relicensing it to LGPL version 2.1 "or later". If an author could not be contacted or permission could not be obtained, and the contribution was considered relevant for copyright purposes, the affected code was either excluded from LGPL mode (not built), or removed or rewritten. This is the standard in open source relicensing processes. Keep in mind that using LGPL mode is still on the user's own risk. Even though I claim that the relicensing was pretty clean and thorough (measured on the standards of the open source community¹), and I followed the advice of some actual experts, there is still a residual uncertainty due to the fact that I'm not an all-knowing entity (authors could have taken someone else's code and pretend it's their own) nor a lawyer (meaning I might lack associated authority or expertise), and the fact that the judicial system is far from deterministic. The relicensing was performed merely to the best of my knowledge. I reject all responsibility outside of that. This commit also cleans up the "Copyright" file to reflect the finalized relicensing process. ¹ Not to imply that the standards of commercial companies are much higher. Some major tech companies get away with stuff I would not consider clean. See #2033.
2017-10-10 14:21:01 +00:00
mpv can be built as LGPLv2.1+ with the --enable-lgpl configure option. To add
a LGPL mode to mpv, MPlayer code had to be relicensed from GPLv2+ to LGPLv2.1+
by asking the MPlayer authors for permission. Since permission could not be
obtained from everyone, LGPL mode disables the following features, some of
them quite central:
- Linux X11 video output
- BSD audio output via OSS
- NVIDIA/Linux hardware decoding (vdpau, although nvdec usually works)
- Linux TV input
- minor features: jack, DVD, CDDA, SMB, CACA, legacy direct3d VO
player: change 3 remaining GPL-only code pieces to LGPL There has been no new developments or agreements, but I was uncertain about the copyright status of them. Thus this part of code was marked as being potentially GPL, and was not built in LGPL mode. Now I've taken a close look again, and decided that these can be relicensed using the existing relicensing agreements. OSD level 3 was introduced in commit 8d190244, with the author being unreachable. As I decided in commit 6ddd95fd, OSD level 3 itself can be kept, but the "osd" command had to go, and the "rendering" of OSD level 3 (the HAVE_GPL code in osd.c) was uncertain. But the code for this was rewritten: instead of duplicating the time/percent formatting code, it was changed to use common code, and some weird extra logic was removed. The code inside of the "if" is exactly the same as the code that formats the OSD status line (covered by LGPL relicensing). The current commands for adding/removing sub/audio tracks more or less originated from commit 2f376d1b39, with the author being unreachable. But the original code was very different, mostly due to MPlayer's incredibly messy handling of subtitles in general. Nothing of this remains in the current code. Even the command declarations were rewritten. The commands (as seen from the user side) are rather similar in naming and semantics, but we don't consider this copyrightable. So it doesn't look like anything copyrightable is left. The add/cycle commands were more or less based on step_property, introduced in commit 7a71da01d6, with the patch author disagreeing with the LGPL relicensing. But all code original to the patch has been replaced in later mpv changes, and the original code was mostly copied from MP_CMD_SET_PROPERTY anyway. The underlying property interface was completely changed, the error handling was redone, and all of this is very similar to the changes that were done on SET_PROPERTY. The command declarations are completely different in the first place, because the semantic change from step to add/cycle. The commit also seems to have been co-authored by reimar to some degree. He also had the idea to change the original patch from making the command modify a specific property to making it generic. (The error message line, especially with its %g formatting, might contain some level of originality, so change that just to be sure. This commit Copies and adapts the error message for SET_PROPERTY.) Although I'm a bit on the fence with all the above things, it really doesn't look like there's anything substantial that would cause issues. I thus claim that there is no problem with changing the license to LGPL for the above things. It's probably still slightly below the standard that was usually applied in the code relicensing in mpv, but probably still far above to the usual in open source relicensing (and above commercial standards as well, if you look what certain tech giants do).
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Some of these will be fixed in the future. The intended use for LGPL mode is
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with libmpv, and currently it's not recommended to build mpv CLI in LGPL mode
at all.
build: make LGPL mode final (via --enable-gpl) Rename --enable-preliminary-lgpl2 to --enable-gpl. This concludes the relicensing. Some things are still to do (relicensing some still-GPL optional code), but we consider the code included by --enable-gpl to be fully relicensed. The relicensing was performed by asking every known author for permission for relicensing it to LGPL version 2.1 "or later". If an author could not be contacted or permission could not be obtained, and the contribution was considered relevant for copyright purposes, the affected code was either excluded from LGPL mode (not built), or removed or rewritten. This is the standard in open source relicensing processes. Keep in mind that using LGPL mode is still on the user's own risk. Even though I claim that the relicensing was pretty clean and thorough (measured on the standards of the open source community¹), and I followed the advice of some actual experts, there is still a residual uncertainty due to the fact that I'm not an all-knowing entity (authors could have taken someone else's code and pretend it's their own) nor a lawyer (meaning I might lack associated authority or expertise), and the fact that the judicial system is far from deterministic. The relicensing was performed merely to the best of my knowledge. I reject all responsibility outside of that. This commit also cleans up the "Copyright" file to reflect the finalized relicensing process. ¹ Not to imply that the standards of commercial companies are much higher. Some major tech companies get away with stuff I would not consider clean. See #2033.
2017-10-10 14:21:01 +00:00
The following files are still GPL only (--enable-lgpl disables them):
audio/out/ao_jack.c will stay GPL
audio/out/ao_oss.c will stay GPL
stream/dvb* must stay GPL
stream/stream_cdda.c unknown
stream/stream_dvb.* must stay GPL
stream/stream_dvdnav.c unknown
video/out/vo_caca.c unknown
video/out/vo_direct3d.c unknown
video/out/vo_vaapi.c probably impossible (some company's code)
video/out/vo_vdpau.c probably impossible (nVidia's code)
video/out/vo_x11.c probably impossible
video/out/vo_xv.c probably impossible
video/out/x11_common.* probably impossible
video/vdpau.c hard (GPL-only parts must be ifdefed)
video/vdpau.h unknown
video/vdpau_mixer.* actual code must be rewritten
build: make LGPL mode final (via --enable-gpl) Rename --enable-preliminary-lgpl2 to --enable-gpl. This concludes the relicensing. Some things are still to do (relicensing some still-GPL optional code), but we consider the code included by --enable-gpl to be fully relicensed. The relicensing was performed by asking every known author for permission for relicensing it to LGPL version 2.1 "or later". If an author could not be contacted or permission could not be obtained, and the contribution was considered relevant for copyright purposes, the affected code was either excluded from LGPL mode (not built), or removed or rewritten. This is the standard in open source relicensing processes. Keep in mind that using LGPL mode is still on the user's own risk. Even though I claim that the relicensing was pretty clean and thorough (measured on the standards of the open source community¹), and I followed the advice of some actual experts, there is still a residual uncertainty due to the fact that I'm not an all-knowing entity (authors could have taken someone else's code and pretend it's their own) nor a lawyer (meaning I might lack associated authority or expertise), and the fact that the judicial system is far from deterministic. The relicensing was performed merely to the best of my knowledge. I reject all responsibility outside of that. This commit also cleans up the "Copyright" file to reflect the finalized relicensing process. ¹ Not to imply that the standards of commercial companies are much higher. Some major tech companies get away with stuff I would not consider clean. See #2033.
2017-10-10 14:21:01 +00:00
DOCS/man/ GPLv2+
bootstrap.py unknown license, probably GPLv2+ or LGPLv2+
etc/mplayer-input.conf unknown license, probably GPLv2+
mpv.desktop unknown license, probably GPLv2+
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etc/restore-old-bindings.conf unknown license, probably GPLv2+
2019-09-20 09:38:16 +00:00
None of the cases listed above affect the final binary if it's built as
build: make LGPL mode final (via --enable-gpl) Rename --enable-preliminary-lgpl2 to --enable-gpl. This concludes the relicensing. Some things are still to do (relicensing some still-GPL optional code), but we consider the code included by --enable-gpl to be fully relicensed. The relicensing was performed by asking every known author for permission for relicensing it to LGPL version 2.1 "or later". If an author could not be contacted or permission could not be obtained, and the contribution was considered relevant for copyright purposes, the affected code was either excluded from LGPL mode (not built), or removed or rewritten. This is the standard in open source relicensing processes. Keep in mind that using LGPL mode is still on the user's own risk. Even though I claim that the relicensing was pretty clean and thorough (measured on the standards of the open source community¹), and I followed the advice of some actual experts, there is still a residual uncertainty due to the fact that I'm not an all-knowing entity (authors could have taken someone else's code and pretend it's their own) nor a lawyer (meaning I might lack associated authority or expertise), and the fact that the judicial system is far from deterministic. The relicensing was performed merely to the best of my knowledge. I reject all responsibility outside of that. This commit also cleans up the "Copyright" file to reflect the finalized relicensing process. ¹ Not to imply that the standards of commercial companies are much higher. Some major tech companies get away with stuff I would not consider clean. See #2033.
2017-10-10 14:21:01 +00:00
LGPL. Linked libraries still can affect the final license (for example if
FFmpeg was built as GPL).