[Matroska-general] Re: Matroska in closed source products

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Hi Hauke,

just wanted to inform you that after serious discussion, it seems the 
main author of libmatroska, Steve Lhomme, doesnt want to go the L-GPL 
way for the main lib that quickly.

For this reason, i recommend you look at BBB 's C library instead, it 
should work for most playback aspects already. If you need a link to the 
source again, gimme a shout.

Christian
matroska project admin

Hauke Duden wrote:

> Ronald Bultje wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 22:48, Christian HJ Wiesner wrote:
>>
>>> 2. New C library from BBB : Ronald 'BBB' Bultje has made a new 
>>> library in C, not C++ like libmatroska/libebml, so that maybe one day 
>>> matroska may get supported in FFMPEG/libavformat. The license for 
>>> this library is L-GPL, so this allows use in closed source programs 
>>> also, as long as you make the code for the library itself available, 
>>> and even via a link in your documentation. This code can not be found 
>>> in the matroska CVS, its currently in the Gstreamer CVS ( 
>>> http://gstreamer.net ) and used in the matroska plugin for gstreamer. 
>>> Its currently playback only, but should be ideal for your purpose, 
>>> even if some of the more advanced features of matroska are not 
>>> implemented yet.
>>
>>
>>
>> Just wanted to clear up two things:
>> 1) it's not a lib. ;). It's a plugin. If you want to use it yourself,
>> copy the files, make it a loadable plugin in your system and provide
>> LGPL sources and patches. That's fully legal. Don't forget that the
>> sources require glib. There's a win32 version of glib, it's LGPL too.
>> You can also do a search'n'replace, we mostly only use types from glib
>> (gint instead of int, gchar instead of char, etc. - for portability
>> reasons), we don't use that many glib functions.
>> 2) the things unimplemented are menus and metadata.
>>
>> The code can be found in CVS, module gst-plugins, dir gst/matroska/.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the info. It not being a lib (yet) doesn't bother me much. 
> I've got quite some experience in creating libraries from application 
> code, so maybe I'll first make a lib out of it and then use that for our 
> own plugin. Or, maybe, if the plugin interface is similar to ours, I'll 
> just try to modify it to make it compatible. I'll have to see what the 
> code looks like...
> 
> In any case, you can be assured that if we use your code we'll honor the 
> LGPL and make all changes available.
> 
> Hauke
> 
> 
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