VLC Core is LGPL

This is my website :) (I did not expect that to come on HN, to be honest)<p>Anyway, the title is, of course, misleading. VLC core, named libVLCcore is LGPL since last year (I did it too in december) and the wrapper for 3rd party applications libVLC was relicensed too at the same time.<p>This is different, since most modules of VLC are now LGPL. We speak about codecs, demuxers, format parsers, protocol accesses, filter and outputs. And those modules are way more important in terms of contributors and lines of code than the VLC core. In fact, we speak here of 230 people with around 300,000 lines of code, compared to 80 people and 80,000 lines of code for the VLC core.<p>Of course, from a higher-level point of view, all those playback modules are part of the "core of VLC" :)

Congratulations to JB and team on completing this Herculean task! I had the pleasure of meeting JB when he and I shared a ride from the airport in Porto Alegre for this year's FISL.[1] When he asked me what I was going to be presenting on, I (not yet knowing anything about JB's work) had some trepidation in responding: my presentation was on corporate open source anti-patterns[2] -- and one of my conclusions was that the GPL has essentially outlived its usefulness. Fearing that this was a very controversial conclusion, I approached it gingerly in my conversation with JB; needless to say I was very relieved to learn that he and the VLC team had come to broadly similar conclusions -- and surprised that they felt so strongly that they had taken on the arduous task of relicensing. Congratulations again to JB and team; I'm sure that they join the ranks of us who never want to engage in a(nother) licensing discussion as long as we live!<p>[1] <a href="http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/08/01/post-revolutionary-open-source/" rel="nofollow">http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/08/01/post-revolutionary-op...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://smartos.org/2012/07/27/corporate-open-source-anti-patterns-doing-it-wrong/" rel="nofollow">http://smartos.org/2012/07/27/corporate-open-source-anti-pat...</a>

The really interesting story is the how(linked from main article):<p>Part 2 (probably the more interesting): <a href="http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-2" rel="nofollow">http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...</a><p>Part 1: <a href="http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project" rel="nofollow">http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...</a>

So every contributor essentially gets to vote on the license change, and their vote is proportional to the contribution they made (because if they vote no, their contributed code has to be rewritten).<p>I think I quite like it, but only because there is an option to replace their code if they vote no (which admittedly may be very technically difficult). No single contributor can truly veto the license change.<p>Clearly has it's downsides though.

This is modules, not core. Core was last year: <a href="http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=36ab287e77e9df059f261ed1cfb13fc4674182ec" rel="nofollow">http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=36ab287e77e9df...</a>

Does this mean VLC will be back on the App Store? I remember it being pulled due to a contributor (who around ~2010 worked for Nokia) complaining to Apple.

Congratulations to Jean-Baptiste, that's been an incredible arduous piece of work for him.

On a reading of how it was done, I guess if anyone had contributed stuff under the GPL and particularly objected to LGPL relicensing the could probably still make arguments about derivative works...<p>Interestingly there's no mention of dissenting opinions from anywhere. Not that I'm implying that this move is a bad thing, I would just expect if you ask a large enough group of developers <i>any</i> question about licensing you would get a variety of arguments cropping up.

Good for them, I guess. Though VLC's popularity still makes me pretty sad and how better video players like MPC-HC (on Windows) and mplayer/mplayer2 (on everything else) are much more unknown in comparison. I mean, most of VLC's development outside of the streaming stuff has been about playing catch-up with these two for years.<p>But well, the unfortunate truth is that many people are bad at computers and if they manage to mess their system playback up, VLC can certainly feel like a "rescue" with its stand-alone nature. But well, I doubt most people care about high-quality media files to begin with, and VLC sure plays those 700MB XviD AVIs and so on just fine...

This mean that VLC could be back on the AppStore.

Sun RPC should be mentioned here.<p>The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the guily and the irresponsible <a href="http://spot.livejournal.com/315383.html" rel="nofollow">http://spot.livejournal.com/315383.html</a><p>GNU/Linux - finally it's Free software <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/08/30/gnulinux-finally-its-free-software/" rel="nofollow">http://webmink.com/2010/08/30/gnulinux-finally-its-free-soft...</a><p>The Saga of Sun RPC <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/27/sun-rpc.html" rel="nofollow">http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/27/sun-rpc.html</a>

See also this post on Mozilla relicensing:<p><a href="http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/</a>

Wait, doesn't the LGPL require users to be able to substitute their own compiled version?<p>How does the LGPL relicense solve the Apple AppStore problem everyone is talking about? Apple may approve LGPLd code, but as far as I can tell, they still do not comply with it under their current distribution system.<p>edit: wrote iOS instead of LGPL in the first line, thanks simonh

That's a shame.

Lots of efforts that otherwise could have been used on something more productive.<p>GPL was just fine. No VLC on AppStore - I could live without. Hey, I can live without Apple too but this is not about me.

Every time a GPL related post comes up, it always reminds me of the sqlite project, and how the world could be simpler without those weird licenses.<p><a href="http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html</a>