They were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us.
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.
But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
That's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
Could there have been other / better moves with sending a reminder.
I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution.
Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
> - Rockchip's code is gone
> - FFmpeg gets nothing back
> - Community loses whatever improvements existed
> - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.
To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.
But there's a difference between "refuses" and "apologizes and admits confusion" and then forgets because lazy / or pretends to forget, and will likely fix it if you remind them.
Escalation can be gradual: reminder, warning, final warning, then nuclear.
Or, you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] and that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X).
That way, others know you defend your territory and that compliance is rewarded.
I think here it is a final warning stage (nuclear would be court, which could and should be an option).
Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications
It's a call to push the devs to say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc
Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins
Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.
I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.
The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.
Not familiar with Rockchip. Plenty of searches come up with cases of people incorporating ffmpeg into Rockchip projects. I still see the license files and headers. What is different with this DMCA takedown?
Is working around accessing an embargoed site really any better than just accessing it directly? Morally, what's the difference?
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
Not a fan of the CCP, but GH in general has a big problem with users not understanding and respecting licensing and passing off others' code as their own, sometimems unintentionally, often not.
Time to create a decentralized, blockchain-based GitHub (GitCoin?) and have every commit be a transaction on the chain. Nothing would ever be takedownable.
This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.
But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
"Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too"
reconcile with
"doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL"
I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution.
Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc.
There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
But waiting 2 years in silence, then suddenly DMCA without reminder, I don't get it (and we haven't heard the devs on that yet).
But there's a difference between "refuses" and "apologizes and admits confusion" and then forgets because lazy / or pretends to forget, and will likely fix it if you remind them.
Escalation can be gradual: reminder, warning, final warning, then nuclear.
Or, you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] and that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X).
That way, others know you defend your territory and that compliance is rewarded.
I think here it is a final warning stage (nuclear would be court, which could and should be an option).
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.
Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.
In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.
I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.
The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.