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Documentation |
Copyright Policy |
/docs/copyrightpolicy/ |
Any contributions to the framework, melt, melted, libmvcp, and the core, avformat, gtk2, normalize, resample, sdl, sdl2, sox, and xml modules must assign copyright to "Meltytech, LLC." Otherwise, you can copyright it in a name of your choosing unless, of course, you have integrated a fair amount of code that someone else wrote and copyrighted.
The framework and libmvcp client libraries are covered under LGPLv2.1. melted, melt, melted-console, and melted-client applications are covered under GPLv2. Modules should strive to be LGPL to make them available through the framework as LGPL.
All contributions to the framework, mlt++, libmvcp, and the core module must be provided under the LGPL v2.1 license. All contributions to melt and melted must be provided under the GPL v2 or v3 license. Modules (plugins) can be offered under different licenses. If you are contributing to an existing module, then you must use the same license as the rest of the code in that module. If you are contributing to your own, new module, you can license however you choose. However, at this time, it must be a license compatible with Free Software to be included in the repository at mltframework.org.
You do not want to be accused of copying someone's code and changing copyright or license without permission. The license is straightforward: you must retain the original author's license unless you receive explicit permission. There are a few ways to approach the copyright declaration depending upon the intermingling and changes. If you heavily comingle original and new code or lightly modifiy the original code, you can retain the original's copyright including the years, and then add your copyright for the current year. If you can separate the MLT integration from the core subroutines, then you can put the core subroutines into a separate file with the original copyright and just copyright the MLT integration code as your own. However, if you have heavily modified the original code beyond nearly all recognition, you can copyright it as your own and attribute the original author as inspiration.