mediacoder

According to Wikipedia's mediacoder entry (retrieved 11/Jan/2012), prior to 2008 mediacoder was "free and open source". This strongly suggests it was issued under a copyleft license, and all copyleft licenses are necessarily irrevocable. E.g. under the GNU GPL, afaik a developer is entitled to make and distribute non-copyleft improvements without the source for the improvements, but any distributor of the new work is legally obliged to provide sufficient source code as to readily allow compilation of the original copyleft version. Thus afaik if the original version was copyleft, the developer, sourceforge, or any other distributor cannot legally distribute the improved non-copyleft version without making equally available at least the complete source code for compiling the original copyleft version. Furthermore, although sourceforge is not legally obliged to continue to serve a copyleft project, I think that considerations of goodwill (and hence good business sense) suggest that they should do so so as to discourage illegal behavior by developers. Copyleft is not only a legal contract, it is a social contract, and 'bait & switch' tactics leave a sour taste in the mouth. Mediacoder's developer may decide to act illegally, but if sourceforge enables such bait & switch tactics it will be vulnerable to being replaced by an organization that adheres to the spirit of copyleft software. If anyone can point us to an earlier copyleft version, then afaik anyone else could upload it as a sourceforge project, and all of us could download it. Or sourceforge, could you please make available the latest copyleft version in your archives.

I think people are getting confused by the fact that SourceForge is placing a big ad for AVS and sometimes other media converters on the page with nice, big Download Free buttons, while there is no download for Mediacoder. It looks like the actual app we're looking for has been taken down.

very good project