ST-Ericsson glues gstreamer into Android - and makes it proprietary

It is always surprising what kind of things the industry is coming up with ;)

Here at ELCE, ST-Ericsson has just presented how they replaced OpenCore with gstreamer as the supplier/provider of multimedia encoding/decoding to the Android software stack.

This is definitely an interesting technical solution - probably one that makes sense if you have existing gstreamer modules/drivers.

What really makes me wonder though, is their licensing. To make sure only ST-Ericsson customers can use it, they have implemented a glue layer library that ties into android, and this library is binary-only licensed and distributed under terms that permit to use it together with their hardware.

Isn't it strange? Now the Android software stack is Free Software, and gstreamer is Free Software. But ST-Ericsson needs to put some proprietary blob in the middle. Of course, legally they are allowed to do it: Android is Apache-style licensed and gstreamer is LGPL. But from a moral/ethical/technical point of view, it still is blasphemy to me.

UPDATE: The license is actually a 'standard' proprietary license. There seem to be technical reasons that tie this code to the specific SoC of ST-Ericsson. Nonetheless, I keep my original criticism: It has a bad aftertaste if you combine two FOSS programs by a proprietary layer in between