MediaCoder is a really great piece of freeware encoding software on Windows. The author is quite clearly trying to understand and help out with the licensing problems and instead comes up against the free software Spanish inquisition:
The MediaCoder author would be a great example of such a person.
If the author of MediaCoder uses someone else's software, it's quite reasonable he obeys their rules for that software. He obvisously didn't read the licence for the software (even when asked multiple times). He even makes claims about various software being in the public domain.
Seriously the ffmpeg authors are quite within their rights to be rude to someone VIOLATING THEIR COPYRIGHT. You make it sound like MediaCoder author is the injured party - he is not.
Maybe I'm just biased (as a OSS developer who has had my software ripped off), but I don't see he is trying to fix the problem. His first comment on the issue essentially was: "It does not violiate license of FFmpeg." Personally I'd be more then a little hostile against someone who started from that position.
If he was he'd do what he was advised to do many times in the issue tracker:
* Read the licences involved
* Hire a lawyer if he doesn't to understand it
* Follow it's terms
Argueing and tweaking things in his EULA isn't part of that solution. It's really not ffmpeg's position to offer him legal advice on how to comply with the licences.
If he genuininly believes he is following the licence, maybe he should talk to his lawyer about defamation?
You can't really expect anyone that is distributing software free of charge to get a laywer to understand the (L)GPL. As I see it, everyone is on the same side here, donating free time to create software that is offered free of charge. I don't see how that warrants rudeness.
Open source is/was never about the money. It's about the freedom of having the source. The license is pretty easy and simple if you distribute your modified soft with the same open source licence.
The concept of the gpl is: I show you my code, if you show me yours. It's about sharing and repriocity.
It's not about snatching the nice tools built by the community, putting a nice gui layer and some extra features on it and closing the source. The fastest way for our friend here to adhere to the license is dropping ffmpeg or releasing his code as gpl. He doesn't seem to be willing to do that.
How would you like people who copy your sourcecode without permission and sell it to anyone?
Free of charge? He charges $399 for a premium version (which consists almost entirely of ripped-off open source software), and you think he doesn't have money to pay a lawyer?
It seems like the attitude in those posts is of someone looking to litigate. They would have to tell their lawyers where MediaCoder is breaking the GPL so why not just tell the MediaCoder author and check later if it's compliant?
It's still rude to tell someone that they are wrong but refuse to tell them why.
I understand that the other side is not helping by consistently misunderstanding everything.
At some point, if I was representing the GPL side in the argument, I'd realize that my attitude is not helping the cause and I would either change my attitude or ask another supporter to take over in a more polite way.
It takes energy to remain polite and nice in such discussions, but that's the price for convincing people. Otherwise, you are just an arrogant brat, even if copyright law is on your side (think RIAA - technically, the law is on their side).
The amount of time they spent saying "read teh GPLs" they could have easily spent saying: You EULA is wrong, you need x, y, z. They've done the work to find out he's violating but unlike their source they're not sharing why he's violating.
I think it is a bit unfair to expect everyone to know the score all the time. A lot of us humans are pretty rubbish. To be honest I think there is a certain amount of vitriol in their writing that makes me think they are enjoying the feeling of superiority and making the guy squirm. Sure they have the moral high ground but they drag themselves down towards his level with their attitude.
Dark is also the primary and original dev for x264, IIRC. I remember talking with him last year on IRC when I was working on a little patch for ffmpeg (memory leaks). Very nice and helpful (especially since ffmpeg as a whole is very sloppy and disorganized). A++ would buy again.
Just to note, though, diego was really being an asshole in that thread. Yeah the guy was violating the license, but it's not like suing him is going to do anything other than make him comply with the license. Might as well take 10 seconds and type out what he needs to do and save some time and energy. That kind of rudeness makes me not want to work with the project again as I don't like people being needlessly aggressive over people who aren't actively being malicious. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Not the original dev. Laurent's the original dev, and Loren's the dev who has done the most work over the years. I'm theoretically the secondary dev though I do more work nowadays than Loren does, by and large.
With respect to the topic Diego is being somewhat rude, but it's definitely within his rights; one cannot expect a person to be friendly to those who pirate his software. This is primarily the result of hundreds if not thousands of programs infringing ffmpeg copyrights; it has gotten out of control. Almost every single shareware media converter infringes ffmpeg's copyright, for example. After a while, one loses all patience whatsoever--so while I don't fully agree with his approach, I understand completely where he is coming from.
I don't understand the "within his right" response that was made in a few comments here. Everyone is within his right to behave like an asshole; it isn't against the law. You see people like diego behaving the way they do, and other devs supporting this behavior, and you reach your own conclusion.
I'm not talking about laws, I'm talking about reasonableness.
As a simple example, if you insult someone, they are "within their rights" to get mad at you. You may disagree with them getting mad, but the fact that they got mad was not unreasonable.
I completely agree that it's reasonable to get mad at someone who's willfully violating the license to your code. But there's getting mad, and there's consistently behaving like a trollish asshole. If you think diego's behavior at the link above is reasonable, our notions of reasonable behavior are incompatible.
Jeez, I don't even know what MediaCoder has done wrong here. If they're not linking against ffmpeg, just piping to it, MediaCoder's code doesn't need to be GPL'd, right? Anyone care to explain? These ffmpeg guys sure aren't.
He is shipping binary only versions of a modified version of ffmpeg. He needs to comply with the licence for that code, which (vastly simplified version) means he needs to supply source in some way.
[Usual disclaimers apply about lawyer, and not being same, especially with regards to the legal obligations]
