There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg or Rockchip, and HN keeps missing it because it's too busy litigating footnotes.

Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.

The West has turned software into theology. Licenses are no longer pragmatic tools; they're moral texts. You didn't just copy code incorrectly, you sinned. You violated the sacred distinction between "dynamic linking" and "static linking" like a heretic confusing transubstantiation. So of course the response is excommunication via DMCA, administered by a US platform acting as the high court of global legitimacy.

China, meanwhile, treats code the way early America treated British industrial designs: as something you learn from, adapt, and improve until it disappears into the background of actual progress. This isn't because Chinese engineers are "confused" about copyright. It's because they don't share the Western belief that ideas become ethically radioactive if they cross an invisible legal membrane without the right ceremony.

What HN calls "license violations" are, in a broader historical sense, the sound of a rising system refusing to internalize the anxieties of a declining one. The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise. Pretending it's a universal moral truth is like insisting everyone must use QWERTY because it worked for typewriters in 1890.

So when GitHub issues a DMCA takedown, it's not defending openness; it's defending relevance. It's the West saying: the rules still matter, please keep caring about them. But history suggests that once you're relying on process to assert superiority over results, you're already late.

You can cheer this if you want. Just don't confuse enforcement with inevitability. The future usually belongs to the people who ship, not the ones who litigate why shipping was noncompliant.

Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine?

I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.

> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise

If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.

The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.

That has zero relation to any European legalism.

re-framing this as a PRC vs West thing seems forced and weird

Why does China vigorously prosecute Chinese nationals when they pirate Chinese software?

So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too?

A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.

Except of course for that one little detail where Chinese companies take out minor improvement patents to kick the door shut on open source projects that they build on top of.

Software licensing is just another form of property rights, and property rights is what society uses to incentivise civility.

> There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg

Why are you turning this into a discussion about China?

Its not about china.

Its about stealing.

Its not a complex, or western concept.

ChatGPT write this bro?

This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.

I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.

Awesome comment. Thank you.

> Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.

Heard that in a very different context. Care to mention what you are referring to? How do you know?