Comment by netdevphoenix
9 hours ago
> Any reason not to just open source it?
Mmmm...potential commercialisation? Always find it curious that people expect to get source code for free in ways that they don't do for other work (ask George Martin to release his drafts and notes).
The parent commenter is making that comment because this is precisely the nature of why the GPL license exists. Most of the processing of this application is FFMPEG, so why should someone who has done zero development on that library commercialize it?
Most of the processing of the application is FFMPEG yes, but there's a whole lot of application outside of the processing. Video editors UIs that don't make you want to tear your hair out are a valuable commodity and I think OP has the right to commercialize that if they want to. They just need to use FFMPEG in the right way as they do it.
This application doesn't work without FFMPEG. I'm not arguing that the wrapper isn't valuable, I'm saying there is a significant chunk of it that is required for us to work is an open source library.
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From what I understand about this application ffmpeg of only used for export? That is very little of the processing of true, they mentioned the webcodec is used extensively and likely the only real requirement on ffmpeg is muxing into mp4 which to be entirely honest isn't much processing.
FFmpeg doesn't disallow commercialization. Or to put it another way, the authors of FFmpeg specifically allowed commercialization. As long as you follow the LGPL you're free to commercialize your app that uses FFmeg
Or the other likely version: prevent commercialization. No source means that someone can’t make a fork, put on a new domain, run ads and charge money for his work.
The problem is you can commercialise free software if you're creative about it. RMS made a decent amount of money working on emacs, redhat and SUSE exist, google has managed to commercialise chromium
> The problem is you can commercialise free software if you're creative about it.
Did you mean to say that it is a problem? From the rest of your comment, and in the context of GP's comment, it sounds like commercializing is NOT a problem.
prev said that they might not be willing to release the source code so they can commercialise it
> Mmmm...potential commercialisation?
Hence why I asked the question... And not everybody does everything for commercial reasons, so it would be dumb to assume that and therefore not ask the question.
> Always find it curious that people expect to get source code for free in ways that they don't do for other work (ask George Martin to release his drafts and notes).
Where in my question did you get that I expect to get source code for free in ways that I don't for other work?
But regardless, you do know that open source is a common thing right? People open source things all the time, especially on HN.
Also OP already says they don't do any uploading of your videos to the cloud, so this thing already runs local-only. It's not like there is a shortage of video editors around (including ... open source ... video editors)
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