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.
They were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us.
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
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.
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 able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.
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.
> - Rockchip's code is gone
> - FFmpeg gets nothing back
> - Community loses whatever improvements existed
> - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.
To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications
It's a call to push the devs to freely say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc, nothing much, these questions are deliberately open.
Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.
If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg or Rockchip, and HN keeps missing it because it's too busy litigating footnotes.
Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The one you reference doesn't look like it misrepresents the licenses, i.e. of you use it to make your own derivative you would expect to have to share modifications you make to the LGPL code.
Is working around accessing an embargoed site really any better than just accessing it directly? Morally, what's the difference?
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes content is posted on a site people don't want to support, so making a copy of it and viewing/sharing the copy is preferable.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
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.
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.
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.
"Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too"
reconcile with
"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"
> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc.
There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.
But here, as FFmpeg is LGPL and we talk about one single file, there is even less work to do in order to fix that.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.
Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.
In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.
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.
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 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.
To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.
Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 real (legal) question in either case, is how much is actually copied, and how obvious is it.
https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
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."
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 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.
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.
It's fairly trivial to block torrent traffic.
Checks out sufficiently dystopian, yep.
If you could work some gratuitous LLM in there, we could be a little closer to torment-nexus territory. Keep working at it.