Suggestion: Relicense to something more similar to FFMpeg's licenses.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

FFMpeg itself is licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later or GPL-2.0-or-later, depending on which features are included.

By opting for this form of licensing you're ensuring the users of beamcoder have all the same options to rights and permissions as if they just used FFMpeg directly, and none of your rights to your work in beamcoder are diminished.

[sparkpunkd]

We are still finding our way with license choice having previously worked on projects under Apache 2.0 licensing. We'll have a discussion and review the choice. Somehow we need to kick the license can down the road so that the beamcoder license varies with the version. You can call:

beamcoder.licenses()

to see the list of licenses that beamcoder is runtime linking with.

FYI, the reason for choosing GPL-3 when writing beamcoder was that the released v4.1 libraries we download as part of the install process on Windows are compiled with --enable-gpl --enable-version3. We also wanted to include libx264 and libx265 as we have real use cases for these, so the linux builds we are working with have --enable-gpl.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

I get where you're coming from. All the different licenses that come with codecs gets complex really quickly. The main reason I made the suggestion is for users who may want to link against non-free codecs, which is (as I understand it) the reason for licensing under LGPL.

Maybe one way to go about it would be to do something like eslint does, where the developer walks through a wizard, choosing options that are added to a config file. Then, when npm install beamcoder is run it looks for the config file and compiles itself and FFMpeg according to those options if the config file is present. If the config file is not present, then the npm install will output a message asking the user to run node_modules/beamcoder/bin/beamcoder.js --init or something like that, which will launch the wizard, create the config file, attach applicable licenses, and run the compile.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

Thinking about it, such an FFmpeg compiler could even be its own module that beamcoder calls in to as part of its installation.

Hmmmmm. Might do some experimentation this week.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

Or, for that matter, ffmpeg-static could be added as a dependency rather than having the preinstall script?

[sparkpunkd]

Beam Coder needs to link against shared libraries. ffmpeg-static is primarily for when you execute ffmpeg as an external process.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

Beam Coder needs to link against shared libraries.

Sure, but that's a requirement that's being opted in to.

Beamcoder's install_ffmpeg.js downloads FFMpeg from the same locations as ffmpeg-static does for the Windows and Linux cases, it just inflates them to a project-local directory rather than the system shared location.

[jeremy-j-ackso]

I guess I'll take that back. I missed that ffmpeg-static grabs slightly different things.

My bad.

[rezonant]

Please consider switching this to LGPL to match ffmpeg. As of now I'll have to build an entirely new set of bindings which is a shame :-(