The last time I wrote about FAAD2 was last January, with no improvement whatsoever from Nero AG licensing, that was for sure GPL-incompatible standing to FSF’s word (and if they don’t know, who does?), although Debian still carried 2.5 under the assumption that the Nero AG lawyers misunderstood the GPL.
I didn’t write about the change in license with FAAD 2.6, that was released some time ago, that was supposedly changed to some wording that allowed it to be GPL-compatible. Alexis contacted FSF because the terms were still vaguely reminding the previous license, and they confirmed again that the license was incompatible, and that they suggested a different wording for it.
Well, today 2.6.1 version was released with this single note replacing the previous advertisement clause:
** The "appropriate copyright message" mentioned in section 2c of the GPLv2
** must read: "Code from FAAD2 is copyright (c) Nero AG, www.nero.com"
And this makes it quite sure that this time it’s GPL-compatible.
Maybe my original post moved something, even if it took almost an year to get to a solution, the solution is now here.
Later today I’ll work on importing FAAD 2.6.1 in xine-lib-1.2 tree, to replace the patched 2.0.something we have at the moment. I’ll leave to Alexis taking care of adding it to Gentoo 🙂