Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity 2.0.2 - #233 "Option to link against system lame and ffmpeg"

[Benjamin D. <bd...@ub...>]

Am Dienstag, den 17.07.2012, 15:32 +0100 schrieb Steve the Fiddle:
> On 17 July 2012 10:53, Benjamin Drung <bd...@ub...> wrote:
> > Am Montag, den 16.07.2012, 16:21 -0700 schrieb Vaughan Johnson:
> >> On 7/15/2012 8:46 AM, Richard Ash wrote:
> >> > On Sun, 2012-07-15 at 22:15 +1000, David Timms wrote:
> >> >>> [...]
> >> > The result of Benjamin's patches is that users _loose_ the facility to
> >> > choose not having LAME or FFmpeg - Audacity acquires these as hard
> >> > dependencies.
> >>
> >> That borders on license violation, I think. Or at least, over-affiliates
> >> us with LAME and FFmpeg. We *want* users to have to do something extra
> >> to get LAME or FFmpeg, so it's their choice, not ours.
> >
> > Why does linking to (L)GPL libraries border a license violation? You use
> > many GPL and LGPL libraries already.
> >
> > Do you fear a patent violation instead? Then you do not have to worry,
> > because the patch only affects your source tarball distribution, but not
> > your binary distribution.
> 
> What effect would that that have on other Linux distributions that
> take a more cautious line on patent/licensing issues? Would it prevent
> them from including Audacity in their main repositories?

It would have no effect, because the distributions can decide on compile
time what kind of linkage they want. Nothing will change with the patch
unless --disable-dynamic-loading is passed to configure.

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer