The repo in question incorporated FFmpeg code while claiming their code is Apache 2.0-licensed over 1.5 years ago[1]<p>This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.<p>[1] <a href="https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137</a>
Copy pasting code is allowed under LGPL, but doing so while removing license headers and attribution of code snippets would not be.
they waited for more than 1.5 years and they did not forgot
They were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us.<p>Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many <i>hours</i> would pass before a DMCA violation?<p>FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.<p>But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
That's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be <i>able to be used</i> with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.<p>The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
LGPL does not mandate dynamic linking, it mandates the ability to re-assemble a new version of the library. This might mean distributing object files in the case of a statically-linked application, but it is still allowed by the license.
What happens when you want to mix two libraries with different licences?
This depends on the licenses.<p>Copyleft licenses are designed to prevent you mixing code as the licenses are generally incompatible with mixing.<p>More permissive license will generally allow you to mix licenses. This is why you can ship permissive code in a proprietary code base.<p>As for linking, “weak copyleft” license allow you to link but not to “mix” code. This is essentially the point of the LGPL.
If you own one of them, mix in LGPL code, and publish it, the result is entirely LGPL.<p>If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.<p>Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
You determine if the licenses are compatible first. If they are, you're fine, as long as you fulfill the terms of both licenses.<p>If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.
Some licenses, like LGPL, have provisions for this, some just forbid it.<p>In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.
You should keep them in different directories and have the appropriate license for each directory. You can have a top-level LICENSE file explaining the situation.
You dynamicly link against it
Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.<p>I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.<p>The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The DMCA notice is available here: <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-18-ffmpeg.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...</a><p>The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
Thanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred.<p>To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.
LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL.<p>But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.<p>Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.
Best case scenario is it nukes the whole concept of software patents and the whole ugly industry of copyright hoarding. The idea that perpetual rent-seeking is a natural extension and intended outcome of the legal concepts of copyrights and patents is bizarre.
Llm's do not verbatim disgorge chunks of the code they were trained on.
I think it's probably less frequent nowadays, but it very much does happen. This still-active lawsuit[0] was made in response to LLMs generating verbatim chunks of code that they were trained on.[1]<p>[0] <a href="https://githubcopilotlitigation.com" rel="nofollow">https://githubcopilotlitigation.com</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai-github-copilot-class-action-lawsuit-ai-copyright-violation-training-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...</a>
You can still very trivially get entire chunks of code from Copilot including even literal author names (simply by prodding with a doxygen tag).
Surely they do sometimes?
Everything is a derivative work.
Everything humans make up also comes from source material.<p>The real (legal) question in either case, is how much is actually copied, and how obvious is it.
Not familiar with Rockchip. Plenty of searches come up with cases of people incorporating ffmpeg into Rockchip projects. I still see the license files and headers. What is different with this DMCA takedown?<p><a href="https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip</a>
someone post an archive link, I can't read that
Does this work for you? <a href="https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984</a>
Xlssid
Is working around accessing an embargoed site really any better than just accessing it directly? Morally, what's the difference?<p>If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
What's stopping you from making the archive link yourself?
<a href="https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984</a>
<a href="https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984</a>
The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right.<p>The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."<p>All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
I recently had to deal with a ministry in Canada, where a worker who had been there since 20 years ago failed even a basic test of competence in reading comprehension. Then multiple issues with the OPC (Office of Privacy Commissioner) failing entirely on a basic issue.<p>Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many month delays for landlords and 2 day notices for tenants paints a more realistic picture.<p>In fact, one such landlord lied, admitted to lying, and then had their lie influence the decision in their favor, despite it being known to be false, by their own word. The appeal mentioned discretion of the adjudicator.<p>Not sure how long that can go on before a collapse, but I can't imagine it's very long.
Incompetence is a taboo. It shouldn't be.<p>I think it should be perfectly OK to make value judgements of other people, and if they are backed by evidence, make them publicly and make them have consequences for that person's position.
So here we have the good guys using the law and ... at least temporarily ... winning... so what's your point?
You can see it everywhere. In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. I see this over and over. Same thing all over the west.<p>I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
Alright, love it. Who do I donate to?
Clash of cultures. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation</a> vs. the 鬼子 鬼佬 老外
Not a fan of the CCP, but GH in general has a big problem with users not understanding and respecting licensing and passing off others' code as their own, sometimems unintentionally, often not.
Time to create a decentralized, blockchain-based GitHub (GitCoin?) and have every commit be a transaction on the chain. Nothing would ever be takedownable.
Git already has a blockchain; what you will need to do next is to make copies of the objects of the repositories on other servers as well. (However, I don't know if the blockchain includes tags on git (it seems to me that it might not but I don't know enough about it), although it does include objects. Fossil includes tags in the blockchain as well as files, commits, etc.)
I mean, torrenting is decentralised and not technically takedownable. But it was entirely possible to make it legally painful for people involved in it, as seen in eg. The Pirate Bay, megaupload or an entire cease-and-desist letter industry around individual torrenting users<p>Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
The cost would be incredible even for just a pointer to distributed file storage
Github stores about 19 PB. That would cost about $20k a year on Filecoin. Filecoin currently has more supply than demand because it's speculation-driven right now.
There wouldn't be an org maintaining it. You would just buy $100 worth of GitCoin and that would be enough for 10000 commits, or something like that.
git already uses a blockchain lol
Yes, using blockchain to defraud the GPL.<p>Checks out sufficiently dystopian, yep.<p>If you could work some gratuitous LLM in there, we could be a little closer to torment-nexus territory. Keep working at it.
There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg or Rockchip, and HN keeps missing it because it's too busy litigating footnotes.<p>Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.<p>The West has turned software into theology. Licenses are no longer pragmatic tools; they're moral texts. You didn't just copy code incorrectly, you sinned. You violated the sacred distinction between "dynamic linking" and "static linking" like a heretic confusing transubstantiation. So of course the response is excommunication via DMCA, administered by a US platform acting as the high court of global legitimacy.<p>China, meanwhile, treats code the way early America treated British industrial designs: as something you learn from, adapt, and improve until it disappears into the background of actual progress. This isn't because Chinese engineers are "confused" about copyright. It's because they don't share the Western belief that ideas become ethically radioactive if they cross an invisible legal membrane without the right ceremony.<p>What HN calls "license violations" are, in a broader historical sense, the sound of a rising system refusing to internalize the anxieties of a declining one. The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise. Pretending it's a universal moral truth is like insisting everyone must use QWERTY because it worked for typewriters in 1890.<p>So when GitHub issues a DMCA takedown, it's not defending openness; it's defending relevance. It's the West saying: the rules still matter, please keep caring about them. But history suggests that once you're relying on process to assert superiority over results, you're already late.<p>You can cheer this if you want. Just don't confuse enforcement with inevitability. The future usually belongs to the people who ship, not the ones who litigate why shipping was noncompliant.
> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise<p>If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.<p>The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.<p>That has zero relation to any European legalism.
Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine?<p>I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.
I think both of you are right. But OP may think of the larger picture. A bit like 'move fast and break things', that sort of things where you blur the lines when it's valuable enough. Not that I agree with this ethical stance, but surely there's some sclerotic aspect of being too stiff on rules. It's a weird balance.
re-framing this as a PRC vs West thing seems forced and weird
This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.<p>I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.<p>The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.
So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too?<p>A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.
> There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg<p>Why are you turning this into a discussion about China?<p>Its not about china.<p>Its about <i>stealing</i>.<p>Its not a complex, or western concept.
Except of course for that one little detail where Chinese companies take out minor improvement patents to kick the door shut on open source projects that they build on top of.
Why does China vigorously prosecute Chinese nationals when they pirate Chinese software?
Software licensing is just another form of property rights, and property rights is what society uses to incentivise civility.
ChatGPT write this bro?
Awesome comment. Thank you.<p>> Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.<p>Heard that in a very different context. Care to mention what you are referring to? How do you know?