Kieran Kunhya

One of the ways to create one of the companies I created, which is doing consulting and integration of those types of applications, where you integrate VLC into third-party solutions, like inside game engines or stuff like that.

With DPL, you couldn't do that because that means you needed to open source everything.

And those are for a lot of commercial companies who don't want that.

And FFmpeg is exactly the same.

LGPL forces you to give back what you change on this component, this library, which is why it's library GPL.

And so you can use FFmpeg as LGPL into any type of application, even non-open source, but you need to give back the modification you did on FFmpeg.

Same on libvlc.

It depends on the company, but a company whose business model requires the application to be closed source, yes, it's limited.

So that's why, for example, I moved to LGPL.

The second reason is a bit more obscure, is that the terms of condition of the app store, the Apple app store for iOS, makes it very complex to have GPL application on it,

while it's easier to have LGPL applications on it.

So VLC on Windows and on Mac and on Linux is GPL.

The core is LGPL, but on iOS, the iPhone version and the Apple TV version is a type of different license called the MPL.

And yes, I went and changed the license and it was a long story.

Yeah, so I think basically to change the license, you have to contact all the contributors.

Yes, it's very important to understand that open source projects are what we call in the U.S.

copyright law joint work or in civil law collective works or collaborative works.

is that you work all together in terms of the same goal, and then it creates one software, which is one release.

But the copyright is kept by all the individuals.

Some open source projects don't do that.