GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 590964
Varying licensing in COPYING file in release tarballs
Last modified: 2009-09-11 21:37:36 UTC
When a COPYING file is missing, autotools copies one in and ships it with tarballs. What license (GPL2 or GPL3) it copies, depends on the version of automake. Due to that the previous release tarballs have been having pretty random COPYING files. For example 0.10.5 COPYING said GPL3, 0.10.6 said GPL2, and 0.10.7 was GPL3 again. Edward also said this is even more complex, as it depends on the libav* licensing it is being linked against, but I suppose that's a LGPL vs GPL thing, not GPL2 vs GPL3. Please clear up the licensing found in COPYING file, instead of random GPL version based on release managers used automake version.
Setting severity and milestone as suggested by Edward on IRC
Did libav* change their licensing at some point? The current version seems to be GPL v2, so I'll use that for this gst-ffmpeg release.
commit 438b5517d5f3355683f8edad6a17ef35b2db67e0 Author: Jan Schmidt <thaytan@noraisin.net> Date: Fri Sep 11 22:35:33 2009 +0100 license: Add COPYING and COPYING.LIB Add GPLv2 COPYING file, and LGPL COPYING.LIB. Add the boilerplate text about the plugin code being LGPL versus the linked plugin being GPL. Fixes: #590964