> Other modules, including scripting and visualization, will remain GPL-licensed at least for the time being, because they do not impede the ability of third-party developers to write non-GPL playback applications, which was the leading use-case motivating the change.
Posted Nov 25, 2012 12:27 UTC (Sun) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141)
[Link]
There you go. While I have to admit that the blog entries do not prominently talk about the reasons why the relicensing was done, it's not like there is no statement at all in that direction.
Note that the FOSS alternatives to the VLC backend/plumbing code are all LGPL or even more liberally licensed. This reminds me more of the decision to make glibc LGPL rather than GPL - plenty of alternative libc implementations exist. Thus for third-party devs there is no incentive to use the more restrictively licensed library.