[theora] Mozilla & gstreamer

[Michael Smith]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Michael Dale<mdale at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Mozilla is looking to include auiod/video capture for Firefox and the
> Mozilla platform in the future. Gstreamer was proposed as a technical
> solution. Technical issues aside Chris Blizzard expressed concern over
> issues with licenses. Before technical issues for gstreamer with Mozilla
> Firefox can be fully considered the license issues have to be sorted.
>
> As far as I understand (hopefully Mozilla will follow up with some
> details)  the core code and the code for the capture modules would have
> to be trilicensed? Since everything is already available under the least
> restrictive form (the LGPL) I imagine the gstreamer community would be
> oky with this. I don't think the purpose of the gstreamer communities
> license choices where to exclude the use of the library by Mozilla
> foundation open source web browser.

Getting GStreamer relicensed under the mozilla-style tri-license would
be... effectively impossible, I would expect.

Additionally, gstreamer does NOT have capture plugins that actually
work reliably on mac or windows (there are some, but not of high
quality), so there would be a lot of work needed there anyway.

Though I think gstreamer is a good platform, it seems a poor match for
mozilla's needs on both the technical and legal levels; it's unlikely
to be worth pursuing unless at least the legal hurdle changes.

Mike