The Hall of Shame
Apr 21st, 2008 by Graham Booker
So, the good folk over at FFmpeg have stared a Hall of Shame. Basically, it is a page of projects which are using FFmpeg in direct violation of its license. The developers have asked that people link to that page, thereby increasing its ranking in Google. Well, here’s my part. Why should I care about this? Simple, if you look at the list of projects using FFmpeg, you will see Perian listed. Some parts of Perian rely so heavily on FFmpeg that it has an entire section in the code base. Going further, some of the Perian developers are contributing back to FFmpeg, so our copyright is being infringed along with many others.
Hopefully a page like this will help shame these people into doing the right thing, but its power is limited. Somehow I doubt that the latest addition (not yet on the list at the time of this writing) will care that much coming from the country that routinely treats copyright as little more than a hinderance that should be abolished (China).
I actually found this page about two weeks ago when I was searching for the best application to convert videos to Apple TV in Windows. I determined that most of the conversions applications use FFmpeg so I decided to do some research on it as well. I am fairly certain there were 4 or 5 entries when I looked then and I only see 3 now. Maybe the Hall of Shame is making a difference already.
Yes, it is making a difference. I am on the ffmpeg-development list, and a few of these authors have made an effort to do the right thing and get themselves off the shame list and onto the projects list (by conforming to the license).