[XviD-devel] Re: License. GPL or restricted?

Andreas Metzler ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org
Sun May 23 19:56:52 CEST 2004


On 2004-05-23 Jan Lucas wrote
> On 2004-05-23 Andreas Metzler <ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org> wrote:
>> Freshmeat.net says xvid is GPL, however ./src/image/reduced.c says:

>>  *  Under section 8 of the GNU General Public License, the copyright
>>  *  holders of XVID explicitly forbid distribution in the following
>>  *  countries:
>>  *
>>  *    - Japan
>>  *    - United States of America

>> Is this just a forgotten notice, or does it apply? I wonder, because
>> this notice is rather old (2002) and there are more recent
>> contributions by Pascal Massimino licensed under vanilla GPL without
>> the additional restriction.

> Section 8 of the GPL says:
[geographical distribution limitation possible]

> So freshmeat and reduced.c both could be right, as such a limitation is
> explicitly possible under the GPL without any modification to the main
> license.

Hello,
Sorry, my mail was poorly worded. I was not trying to imply that the
license was not correct.

I am merely interested whether the distribution limitation in
./src/image/reduced.c is still valid. - If it is imho it might not be
a terribly bad idea to make the clause more visible by mentioning it
at least in xvidcore/README[1].

On a sidenote, www.xvid.org itself distributes the respective code to
the US; IANAL but I'd have expected a "you are allowed to the download
to the US"-warning.
         thanks, cu andreas

[1] I am aware of: "XviD is licensed as a whole under the terms of
the XviD license described in the file LICENSE This is true for all
files belonging to XviD except for those which specifically carry a
different license header."
-- 
"See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," [SPOILER] Svfurlr fnlf,
fuhggvat qbja gur juveyvat tha.
Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash"


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