Intro: Recently I'm working on an electron based application that is free to use but also has subscription based services. It came to my attention that ffmpeg is shipped with electron, which has GPL/LGPL licence.
My quetion is:
- Am I legally able to still distribute the application and be licence-compliant with ffmpeg without owning any proper licence to it? I thought chromium dealt with the licencing on this topic since so many applications nowadays are shipped with using electron and chromium under the hood.
- How do I compile/build electron to make it licence compatible (in case its not?)
I did a lot of research and I found out the followings:
ffmpeg is shipped with chromium, they built their own version of ffmpeg and it seems they also have licence for it. Although that might be that they just push the responsibility down on the software developer/company who distributes their application with chromium. Chromium licence for ffmpeg: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/+/703e920bb75053bf6b87d41d198cbbfbce3fb7ad/LICENSE
Apparently ffmpeg has a checklist of how to be licence compliant. Does that mean if I do all these steps, I can still distribute the application and can legally use it? Licence checklist for ffmpeg: http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html
checking out some popular electron applications like Discord, Figma, Slack, etc... they ALL have ffmpeg included cause of electron when you install them. I wonder how they made it legal? I don't see any of these checklists done on any of these popular applications.
I'm know very little regarding licences, so any help would be incredibly huge help for me.