The FSF's License and Compliance Lab had previously written about the issues involved with VLC and Apple's App Store.
I first met the original group of VLC developers at
the Solutions GNU/Linux
conference in 2001. I had been an employee of FSF for about a year at
the time, and I recall they were excited to tell the FSF about the
project, and very proud that they'd used FSF's premier and preferred
license (at the time): GPLv2-or-later.
What a difference a decade makes. I'm admittedly sad
that VLC
has (mostly) finished its process of relicensing under
LGPLv2.1-or-later. While I have
occasionally supported
relicensing from GPL to LGPL, every situation is different and I
think it should be analyzed carefully. In this case, I don't support
VLC's decision to relicense.
The main reason to use the LGPL,
as RMS put
eloquently long ago, is for situations where there are many
competitors and developers would face serious difficulty gaining
adoption of a strong-copylefted solution. Another more recent reason
that I've discovered to move to weaker licenses (and this was the case
with Qt) is to normalize away some of
the problems
of proprietary relicensing. However, neither reason applies to
VLC.
VLC is the most popular media player for desktop computers. I know
many proprietary operating system users who love VLC and it's the first
application they download to a new computer. It is the standard for
desktop video viewing, and does a wonderful job advocating the value of
software freedom to people who live in a primarily proprietary software
world.
Meanwhile, the VideoLan Organization's press statements have
been quite vague on
their reasons for changing, saying only that "this change was
motivated to match the evolution of the video industry and to spread the
VLC engine as a multi-platform open-source multimedia engine and
library." The only argument that I've seen discussed heavily in
public for relicensing is ostensibly to address the widely publicized
incompatibility of copyleft licensing with various App Store agreements.
Yet, those incompatibilities still exist with the LGPL
or, indeed, any true copyleft license. The incompatibilities of Apple's
terms are so strict that they make it absolutely impossible to comply
simultaneously with any copyleft and Apple's terms at the same time.
Other similar terms aren't much better, even with Google's Play Store
(— its terms are incompatible with any copyleft license if the
project has many copyright holders).
So, I'm left baffled: does the VLC community actually believe the LGPL
would solve that problem? (To be clear, I haven't seen any official
statement where the VideoLAN Organization claims that relicensing will
solve that issue, but others speculate that it's the reason.) Regardless,
I don't think it's a problem worth solving. The specters of
“Application Store” terms and conditions are something to
fight against wholly in an uncompromising way. The copyleft licensing
incompatibilities with such terms are actually a signaling mechanism to
show us that these stores are working against software freedom
actively. I hope developers will reject deployment to these application
stores entirely.
Therefore, I'm left wondering what VLC seeks to do here. Do they want
proprietary application interfaces that use their core libraries? If
so, I'm left wondering why: VLC is already so popular that they could
pull adopters toward software freedom by using the strong copyleft of
GPL. It seems to me they're making a bad trade-off to get only
marginally more popular by allowing some proprietary derivatives. OTOH,
I guess I should cut my losses on this point and be glad they stuck with
any copyleft at all and didn't go all the way to a permissive
license.
Finally, I do think there's one valuable outcome shown
by this
relicensing effort (which
Gerv pointed out first): it is possible to
relicense a multi-copyright-held code based. It's a lot of work, but it
can be done. It appears to me that VLC did
a responsible and reasonable
job on that part, even if I disagree strongly with the need for such a
job here in the first place.
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