I believe it does. Weakly reciprocal license like LGPL is not equivalent as a permissive license like Apache. I see two main things on the top of my head:
- This ensure that no one can license wash ffmpg and e.g. use rockchip's repo to distribute their own private product based on ffmpeg without publishing their changes
- It ensures proper attribution of the work, which can have an impact on the developer's careers and ffmpeg as a whole.
On top of this, it really should not be complicated to license this code properly (unless rockchip wants to allow point 1, which is illegal)
It's not a matter of "him" personally. Permissive license allow for a work to be taken and redistributed by other entities, without enforcing them to release their changes. This creates a one way relationship that is generally detrimental to the open source ecosystem, allowing work to be stolen away from the public. That being said, choosing a license is situational, and a permissive one can be a great choice in certain instances. For that particular case, I don't see much benefit to having a permissive licence.