As many of probably have noticed GStreamer is experiencing fast growth in the embedded and mobile space with major companies shipping phones or other kind of devices using it. The Palm Pre being among the latest. Of course not everyone appreciate this as much as we do at Collabora Multimedia.
Jan pointed me to this little piece of FUD that had been added to the GStreamer wikipedia article recently:
While the project is licensed under LGPL, there is no copyright indemnity for source code available from Fluendo or other sources primarily because the GStreamer project does not collect copyright assignments from each and every one of its contributors. This incurs significant risk on commercial distributors of GStreamer.
The funny part was that the IP address of the anonymous person changing this was 207.188.29.244. So out of curiosity we did a little whois on that IP address and whose name do we see popping up. Well none other than Real Networks. Seriously guys, if you are going to try to add anonymous FUD to wikipedia articles you might want to do it from outside your own network….
Anyway, I removed it now, but it is still viewable in the Wikipedia history of course.
You could have at least left the grammar fixes!
So it’s untrue?
The link to the wikipedia history should actually be http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GStreamer&diff=303734442&oldid=303619047
If you look at the talk-page for that IP-address it makes you wonder about the sanity of the folks over at Real Networks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:207.188.29.244
(this is of course assuming they have a fixed IP-address)
@Andy: There is no legal basis for claiming there is significant risk. Distributions like Red Hat and Novell are offering indemnification schemes for their distros which includes mostly software developed on the same terms as GStreamer. Including the kernel itself.
@Jeroen: It’s even worse if you look at the IP’s actual edits. As with most users it’s a lot of typo fixes, but all of the substantive edits have just been adding Helix links to whatever article that’s vaguely related to Real Networks.
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someone should post that to slashdot and it will really fire back to them… ;-)
Additionally what they say is false. At Fluendo we’ve worked with a lot of OEMs and we always provide some indemnification to our customers.
Very disappointing…when such a broad range of companies are shipping GStreamer, particularly Sun and Red Hat I am not concerned. Real is irrelevant to me anyway, they are merely an “also-ran” in the whole scheme of things.
Palm -> Face