Jorge G. Mare wrote: >>> I'd love to hear the interpretation from someone who is very much in >>> the know, but who is not also a GPL zealot... >> >> And this is the reason for my meeting on Monday. Daniel Berlin is >> actually a lawyer specialized in open source. Chris DiBona is >> responsible for making sure we conform to open-source licenses at >> Google. > > I was wondering... How did the meeting go? Oh, sorry. Completely forgot about this. The meeting was with Chris only as Daniel didn't make it. His opinion (and I have to stress opinion here. This can be in no way constructed as legal advice) is basically what we already concluded. The GPL is basically so convoluted that the only way to play it safe is to, when in doubt, avoid it if at all possible (unless your project is GPL, of course). When it is not possible, contacting the original authors may help but it could be difficult with projects like ffmpeg as there are dozens (if not hundreds) of contributors so unless the copyright is signed to an entity that has a legal right to make an exemption in an specific case, this will not help either. Hope this helps. -Bruno