[XviD-devel] StreamPlug and the xvid GPL license -

[Mathieu Germain]

Hi  everyone,

I'm sorry this is going to be a very long post, please take some time to 
read as we really want to fix the situation quickly since we have 
infringed on the GPL license of xvid and did not intend to. Here's the 
situation
I am part of cedelia, a team that has developed a software called 
StreamPlug and recently released it. It's a browser plugin for windows 
that can stream any MPEG4 ASP codec over HTTP and supports vorbis for 
the sound (and uses ogg/ogm as container). The plug-in itself is about 
200k to download, making it really fast to download (which was one of 
our main goal : speed, lightness, simplicity). In order to make it as 
simple for the user as possible we integrated our own MPEG4 decoder  
inside the plugin so that one does not have to go look for the codecs or 
install anything else. All that's needed for the playback is included in 
the 200k. And that's where there's a problem : we used parts of the xvid 
decoder for our decoder (on the ground that we find xvid to be the best 
dev around). I cannot stress enough that there was never intention to 
infringe/steal anything and make it  a  proprietary code.

Our interpretation was just wrong : since we do not provide any encoder 
and simply use some parts of xvid's, which we do not modify, we 
assimilated that as an aggregation of our code and the xvid code. 
Simply, instead of  making the user download two elements separately we 
included the xvid part in our  dll. Which was a mistake from our part 
and we sincerely apologize about it. We never hid that we were using 
xvid and it clearly appears in our dll. We simply did things in order to 
be compatible and never even dreamt of claiming paternity over the xvid 
codec.
Radek/sysKin brought our attention to this two days ago through the 
doom9.org forums. We now want to do whatever we have to do to make this 
situation clean and not infringe on your license and your work.

I had the opportunity to then discuss with radek the possibilities that 
are offered to us and of course, there's GPL'ing streamplug. But various 
reasons prevent us as of now to do so. We don't feel very secure about 
the security it provides and moreover, streamplug is part of a larger 
set of  softwares under development which would then have to be GPL too 
while we would like to use these tools/softs for commercial purposes. 
GPL might become an option in the future and we often thought about it 
but it is not at the moment.

So that we came up with two different solutions :

1) "Mere Aggregation"
Radek explained to me the exact meaning of the notion of "mere 
aggreagtion" in the GLP license. As i understand it, if  a non-GPL 
software uses GPL components, this can only be done by separating the 
two executables, allowing one to be GPL and the other to be under 
whatever license it is.
Would it be OK if we did this :
 - Separate the Streamplug code from the xvid code and make them two 
distinct dll (and we would of course provide the lib for that dll etc)
-  Make it possible to download both our dll and the xvid dll at once
I'm not sure about the second point. As i understand it it seems that an 
association of two components is considered aggregation only if the two 
packages have different installers on a CD-Rom or different download 
links on a website. I'm sure you will all see why this is a bit of a 
pain for us if we have to make two separate downloads, since the whole 
point with streamplug is that it is so small to download and simple to 
install, while delivering superior quality (unlike other more famous 
streaming applications).
Basically this solution consists in compiling our xvid decoder and 
complying with all the requirements GPL has and make the xvid dll a 
component, but we'd like to know if it'd be possible to still make it a 
one-download installation.
If this solution is ok, we think we're able to implement it within days 
and replace the current streamplug version.

2) Getting rid of the xvid parts we use
We could also get rid of all that's xvid and reduce what we have to 
MPEG4 specs without anything from xvid. We would of course provide you 
with a copy of the lib so that you can verify that we did indeed get rid 
of anything xvid in our decoder.
It would take us about 2 weeks ( we think ) to release a new version 
under these terms.
The biggest disadvantage we see in this is that it is a bit of a shame : 
we find that an application like StreamPlug can be of benefit for the 
xvid community and again i can't stress enough that in no way can 
streamplug become a danger for future developments of xvid ; we always 
provided links to the sources we used for our decoder inside streamplug 
and anyone can access the information we had. We did not change a thing, 
never claimed paternity or hid we used xvid and only sought compatibility.
We always advise people to use xvid for their encodes and the whole 
story here is basically a big confusion from our part on the terms of 
the GPL license.

I hope one of these solutions will suit you. I guess the second one can 
only be all right, i just wish you guys give a thought about this and 
how we could maybe work it out another way, making streamplug a close 
support of xvid.

If the first solution isn't suitable we'll do the other one. In the 
meantime we are unsure about what to do with the current version of 
streamplug, should we stop distributing it altogether?

We will announce the changes we'll make on streamplug as soon as you 
give us directives as to what you want us to do and explain what we did 
wrong on cedelia.com.

Again i'm really sorry about the length and incredible nuisance such a 
post can be. Moreover we as people feel pretty bad about the whole 
thing. We have the greatest respect for GPL communities and will comply 
with what we're told.

We wish the xvid community a long-lasting predominance  in the realms 
of  compression (and incidentally a happy new year).

Cedelia Team

Link to download streamplug : www.streamplug.com (compatible with 
mozilla/firefox/netscape and IE on windows)