The pains of relicensing

We have a long standing and ongoing process underway in the GStreamer communtity to purge GPL code from our gstreamer and gstreamer-plugins module. The vast majority of the code has always been under the LGPL, but especially in the plugins module there has been a couple of sins. Managed to clear up one of those today with our Monoscope visualization plugin. Problem was that the code in question had 4 authors. Two people who wrote one pair of files each which where then combined later by the third guy to make a alsaplayer plugin and then the 4th guy who took the alsaplayer plugin and made it into a GStreamer plugin. I was quickly able to get hold of one of the two original guys who gave me permission to relicense to LGPL his two files. The third and fourth also gave permission for this, but I had problem finding the second of the two first guys. But the third guy then told me that the code used to be under a no-advertising BSD license, but he had gotten permission to relicense it to GPL for his use. So the solution then was to revert this two files to the original unreachable authors BSD license which means the plugin is now a mix of BSD/LGPL files which is almost as good as all files being LGPL.

Cleared up the h263 plugin license in bugzilla, so hopefully Zaheer can merge that soon. Working on the licensing of the DVB plugin in gst-sandbox, but I need to get hold of someone at Convergence to get permission to relicense four mpegtools files from them.

Sent out the press
release yesterday about Fluendo’s sponsorship of Xiph.org to add RTP support to Vorbis and Theora. Got good response on it from the community which gives a nice warm feeling :)

Transgaming released a new version of their Cedega windows emulation package for games with World of Warcraft support today. Which probably means that they will have me on their subscriber list when WOW is released here in Europe in Februrary. Unless of course my facination with WOW has died down by then. My fascination with any game tend to be shortlived, even those I haven’t really played but just like the concept of. Still don’t understand how a big company gave have Sam Lantiga on their payroll and not take advantage of it to make their application run on both Windows, Mac and Linux using SDL. Then again I shouldn’t wonder as I know how big corporations work….errr…how dysfunctional they are I mean. Maybe I should just stay loyal to good ol’ nethack.