Can you elaborate what you mean? What risk is there to what Microsoft is doing?

keeperofdakeys · on Jan 30, 2016

If APIs are copywritable, then the GP2.1 license of ffmpeg would apply to this library, which is only licensed under the Apache license.

This issue has popped up a number of times for Linux kernel modules, and at what point they are a derived work - https://lwn.net/Articles/13398/. Here is an email thread concerning this http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html.

zanny · on Jan 30, 2016

ffmpeg is also distributed under LGPL, which would be necessary to link this library against it, otherwise the whole product would be GPL anyway.

zaroth · on Jan 30, 2016

The way I see it, this is an open source shim layer. I don't see any copyright issue whatsoever. Whoever chooses to use the shim is using ffmpeg anyway, so they are already exposed to the license in exactly the same way. This just makes it easier to use ffmpeg 'the right way' on various devices, if I understand correctly.

If somehow MS can't make and open source clean compatibility layers for their own software, then that's a big problem.

cbd1984 · on Jan 31, 2016

> If APIs are copywritable

Is that distinct from being copyrightable?

I'm sure that if it becomes a big enough problem, the problem will be buried in lawsuits once Microsoft or IBM or similar stub their toes on it.

on Jan 30, 2016

[deleted]

kyberias · on Jan 30, 2016

I think you're mistaken. This project does not "implement and API written by someone else". They implement a Windows API interface (MediaStreamSource) that wraps the FFmpeg library so that it can be easily used in various Windows OSs.

amlgsmsn · on Jan 30, 2016

Surely FFMPEG being mostly LGPLv2 and some GPLv2 would have a bearing on the API reuse issue? Especially since they're open sourcing the code.