Webcams, eye-candy and Phonon

[Arc Riley]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:52:32PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Of course not. To make things clear, I'm not advocating proprietary code 
> inclusion in KDE4.
> 
> > What I would suggest is seeing what these effects are and implementing
> > them from scratch.
> 
> I warned Logitech that one they release a first version of their video effects 
> for Linux someone will probably try to create a free software implementation. 
> Those are the game rules, and they accept them. However, they still would 
> like to offer their own implementation in a closed source binary.

Ok.  Good that they know the rules of the game. :-)

 
> > Otherwise, prehaps a "video processing" API is 
> > needed which allows both free and proprietary effects to be achived
> > through a standalone executable communicating through a unix pipe/etc.
> 
> Why not through a plugin API ?

Because a plugin is loaded into the codespace of the parent program, and 
could be considered to violate the license of that parent program 
depending on which one you use.

If you're working with a LGPL/GPL framework, contact the FSF license 
team before putting too much work into it.  The way linux works with 
proprietary modules is sketchy, even, and I know there's been problems 
with other projects who actually enforce things like this.

Linus is just really lax about plugins and, I believe, ignoring the GPL 
in some violations in order to promote it's useage.


> The video effects are partially implemented in hardware, and will thus not 
> work on third-party webcams. This is not only a marketing issue but a 
> technical issue as well.

Then you may wish to talk to logitech about this further, because 
example code for partially implementing things like this in hardware is 
something that would be found to be very useful for free software 
developers.

This is how our community works.  Logitech releases their code, others 
get inspired and improve on it or write even cooler stuff, everyone 
wins.  Nothing says that Logitech couldn't release this code for Windows 
as well, as long as they respect the license.

Toys like this are what our community works best at :-)  Think of all 
the teenagers who are hacking together all sorts of cool projects, and 
Logitech wouldn't have to pay a dime for a ton of product-specific code.

Only, if other cameras are also capable of this, that same code would be 
ported there as well.