Jean-Baptiste Kempf

For those interested in the work being done, with a bit more details that just the Changelog, I wrote a longer blogpost about the work here: https://jbkempf.com/blog/2026/ffmpeg-9.0/ More details about the ongoing work on Swscale rewrite, on the various Vulkan changes, the assembly detailed and a bit of statistics about this release.

VLC did a relicense a few years ago and it required them to contact 300+ contributors (!) and even stalk a few of them IRL in order to get in touch with them. Nobody wants to go through this pain… Part 1: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source… Part 2: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source… Part 3: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source…

Blog post about the release: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2022/FFmpeg-5.0 See "Big API changes and deprecations" to know more about the major version bump.

> I'm running 3.0.6 Btw, you should upgrade: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2019/VLC-3.0.7-and-security

Which is what happened to VLC, moving from GPL to LGPL. which took an incredible amount of work... http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg…

Thank you for your work. I have a question about copyright assignment. You wrote: >Unlike a lot of large open source projects, authors of VLC keep all their rights on their code, even if the code is minimal. http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… For an entirely new project, would you rather require all contributors to assign copyright to a single entity which then manages licensing or would you have individuals retain copyright? (Off topic: is this even possible in France?)

Answering to "why can they change the license after the fact?" , I think the answer is something close to "Licenses can be changed after the fact, provided the owners/maintainers get permission from each contributor, or rewrite the problematic parts". VLC went through a similar transition (from GPL to LGPL); jbkempf's blogposts about this experience may be of interest to you: - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg…

All major corporate open source projects have a contributor license agreement (CLA) which contributors must sign. Regardless of whether they intend to close the source in the future or not. See the VLC license change fiasco for why CLAs are very good: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg…

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6015509 Also see the response from VLC: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2013/More-lies-from-Secunia

VLC/Jean-Baptiste Kempf rebuttal: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2013/More-lies-from-Secunia Comments on rebuttal ask "why don't they provide you with working exploit? (in example EIP = 0x41414141)" So someone claims they did attaching an example mkv file? http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Jul/71 https://twitter.com/coolkaveh/status/354716804783943680

Here is a response from the VideoLAN president: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2013/More-lies-from-Secunia

"It turned out the actual player, launched from their compiled app, was a Python wrapper around some VLC libraries" Isn't VLC licensed under the GPL? Or at least was until very recently? http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… Is/was Leaping Brain violating the license? EDIT: the wrapper script is apparently released under the GPL too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834834

The really interesting story is the how(linked from main article): Part 2 (probably the more interesting): http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… Part 1: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg…

> because it would be hard (if even possible) to get every ZoL contributor to relicense I think this is the fundamental point that 'ajross disagrees with. First, they could dump the code and rewrite it. That solves the actual problem (getting a ZFS under GPL) without actually relicensing. If the code from non-Oracle owners is small, that's reasonable. Second, they could ignore their copyrights. I believe this is legal in many jurisdictions where you have many of the copyright holders on board; in particular, for many small patches, they are too small to be copyrightable. (The FSF, for instance, doesn't require copyright assignment if your patch is under 15 lines or otherwise not "legally significant", like a mechanical find/replace.) That's why Conservancy can't file lawsuits with anyone in the entire `git log` of Linux who's contributed one or two patches once, but needs someone who wrote something at least somewhat substantial. See also this VLC blog post and its discussion of French law: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-larg… Third, per that VLC blog post, it is empirically possible to get every contributor to a large project to relicense. And VLC's ownership is almost certainly more varied than ZFS's.