What annoys me most is that the “infection clause” so often results in a strictly worse user experience. Take Audacity, it’s a fully open source piece of softwa

What annoys me most is that the “infection clause” so often results in a strictly worse user experience. Take Audacity, it’s a fully open source piece of software, but to do lots of common operations in it you need to figure out how to link in FFmpeg. This is something your or I can do no problem in our sleep, but it’s an absolute dealbreaker for someone like my dad, and probable millions of other people trying to get into audio projects using free software. I imagine a large number will simply bounce out and stick to GarageBand or whatever. I’m conflicted on this, on one hand I think FFmpeg is a brilliant piece of engineering and I want the creators to receive credit, but on the other I think Audacity and its built in components as listed in its “third party licenses” document are brilliant pieces of software that do receive credit. Further, I believe the one of the primary purposes of technology should be to enable the masses to create, and this licensing places an arbitrary yet powerful restriction on that for folks who aren’t already computer-proficient.