Re: [Linphone-users] Re: FTBFS of linphone 3.1.2 on Fedora 11

[Simon Morlat]

> 1) it would be really helpful to get that release of ortp out of the
> door. We cannot just drop a package (although linphone is the only
> program using it, right?) and replace it with internal version.
No problem.

>
> 2) The second one is much more problematic I am afraid. So far Fedora
> package has video disabled, and I would like to make it enabled (there
> is so much talk about video communication, that it could greatly help in
> linphone's popularity; I know that it is still rather basic, but I think
> competition is not much better, so it should be worthy).
> Unfortunately, linphone seems to depends in compile time on ffmpeg,
> which is absolutely no go in the official Fedora repository. I can see
> four possible solutions for this:
I'm suprised with that.
Why ffmpeg is "no go" ? If you disable H264,WM*,H263 and mpeg4 codecs, there is 
as far as I know no problem with redistribution of ffmpeg with respect of 
patents and GPL. Maybe I missed something ?


>
> a) Somehow make ffmpeg only runtime dependency for linphone. I am not a
> C programmer (and even less video C programmer) so I have no clue
> whether it is a nonsense, but would it be possible to change linphone so
> that it could be compiled and run even without ffmpeg (and without video
> support in such case), but if somehow ffmpeg (and/or some small special
> bindings) would be installed on the same disk, it would know how to use
> them? Then somebody else could provide such bindings in some other
> unofficial repository in the similar manner how patended codecs (and
> indeed ffmpeg itself) are handled.
> b) Switch to something else (e.g., Gstreamer) which has this problem
> already resolved (in the similar manner as in the previous paragraph).
> Probably a silly idea.
Well I do not think gstreamer solved anything. If I understand we simply count 
on the end user to infringe the patents and corrupt the GPL... Or let the end 
user buy decoders from fluendo (unfortunately fluendo has no encoders, so it 
won't help linphone).
If ffmpeg was distributed with patented codecs out, then linphone could at 
least work with theora (and it works not so bad), and also 'snow' ( a free 
codec from ffmpeg guys). 

> c) Probably most realistic right now is just to keep video support
> switched off.
Would be sad...
> d) Move whole linphone to some unofficial repo. Probably not a good
> idea, because visibility of linphone would hugely decrease.
Yes. 
>
> How is this handled in other distributions? I can see that OpenSuSE is
> also on 2.1.1, and Debian doesn't care about patents, right?
Debian has ffmpeg, but with all patented video encoders out (possibly decoders 
also).
http://packages.debian.org/sid/ffmpeg
I think Fedora,debian and others should do legal things as much as possible, 
and thus there are no plenty of solutions: use patent free codecs: theora, 
snow, schrodinger, vorbis, speex...
But there are plenty of 100% legal things and very important features (such as 
libswscale api) in ffmpeg, not to distribute it would be a disaster for the 
performance of video applications.

>
> P.S.: Is there something wrong with gmane.comp.voip.linphone.user? I
> tried to send the first version of this message there and it got lost
> without any response (not even error message came to my mailbox).
I'm unrelated within gmane.comp.voip.linphone.user (don't even know what it 
is), you can simply use the mailing list see below:
http://www.linphone.org/index.php/eng/contacts

This is a very interesting debate. I think a solution would be that ffmpeg 
decide to change their license to something more compatible with patents 
(Apache ?)
It would be less open-source, but it would allow this great project to be used 
in real world and to survive. I would like the FSF to tell his position on 
this topic.

Simon

PS: if you want to chat with me for faster exchanges, use gtalk 
(address@hidden) or msn (address@hidden)