[XviD-devel] License/legal discussions

[Christoph Lampert]

Hi Jan,

your plans do sound very promising to me. A free DSP port would certainly
be very welcome! 
We have nothing in principle against commercial solutions based on XviD. 
We just don't like the (sadly very common) argument that we _must_ permit 
a company to use XviD under some non-free license, because otherwise
they would not be able to use it, and they already invested lots of time
in adapting it to their needs. 

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Jan Rychter wrote:
> Would the authors be willing to either dual-license the code or change
> the license to one that does not include the "anti-patent" restriction?
> There are many licenses that could be used, guaranteeing that the code
> will remain free (in the GPL "pass the source" sense), while not totally
> blocking redistribution.

We are aware that the patent situation makes GPL and XviD a rather bad
couple. That's one reason why we had to restrict distribution in the
last release to exclude the USA and Japan, where software patents are
valid. 

What license exactly did you have in mind? We certainly don't want to
create "just another selfmade license". Maybe we can come up with a
solution. 

gruel