MPlayer Licence Trouble With A Twist

protonman writes "A hefty flame war has broken loose on the debian-devel mailinglist about (amongst other things) the legality of mplayer. The interesting part in this conflict is that unlike in previous alledged GPL violations, the culprit is not the unwillingness to provide the source, but the prohibition of the distribution of binaries, thereby violating section 6 of the GPL: 'You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.' Read also the blurb on the MPlayer homepage."

Comments

The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

..is that most people are perfectly content ignoring license issues, as long as the software does what they want it to do.

Most people don't care about licensing. Copying free software, copying closed software, it's all the same.

Re:The simple fact..

[rmadmin]

I'd agree with this. I recently talked to a Radio Station about buying some new workstations from me. They had no complaints about running 20 machines with the same windows key. I strongly urged them not to, but they don't want to pay the fee.

Re:The simple fact..

[DennisZeMenace]

This does not at all reflect the views of the MPlayer authors. They DO care about licensing, and they DO care about being included in distributions.

The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries, and distros tend to leave out the part of MPlayer thay are the most useful (the Sorensen, ffmpeg, windows-DLL based parts), as a result MPlayer authors get a lot of complaints.

The licensing problems aren't really licensing problems. Most of the libraries that are in the gray area are written by people who work closely with the MPlayer team anyway, and/or are designed for other projects and need heavy modifications to be used in MPlayer (one of the conflicts is just based on the absence of a ChangeLog file!!! You gotta be kidding). There's no risk of lawsuit here, it's just some things have not been done 100% by the book. Somehow that's ok for projects like xine (which includes libavcodec), but MPlayer suffers from some bad rep here.

The fact remains: MPlayer is one of the most IMPRESSIVE piece of open-source software engineering i've ever seen, and it's a shame distros a so conservative about it.

DZM

Re:The simple fact..

[deadsaijinx*]

this is one of the situations were i would actually recomend buying seperate copies of windows. thought it really depends on thesize of the business. if your some local radio network then its probalby no big deal, but if your part of a bigger company like many stations are, then they risk endangering themselves and giving themselves a legal @$$-f*cking they may never forget. on the other hand, i wholly support pirating win at home. in fact, if you even use one valid code then your not doing your part. YEAH ME! Arrg, a pirate's life is the life for me, yo ho yo ho!

Re:The simple fact..

[kyz]

The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries

It's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries because MPlayer is badly written. Don't you get that? If the MPlayer authors actually cared about well-written software, it would use carefully crafted, modular APIs between all the component parts. I could add Quicktime codecs to MPlayer just by copying a hypothetical mp_qtime.so into lib/mplayer/codecs. Instead, it's a sprawling mess with files all over the place and a special codecs.conf acting as a central registry. Why can't each plugin tell Mplayer what capabilities it has, like Xine or XMMS does?

MPlayer is famous simply mostly because it got Win32 codecs to work outside Windows. Kudos to them for doing so, but distributing other people's binary codecs is usually illegal. Apple don't permit you to hack into the Sorensen codecs and get them to work outside Quicktime Player.

How would the like MPlayer authors like mplayer to be embedded as a binary in some media player, without source? Oh yeah, they whined like kiddies when that happened.

I happen to write decompressors for various archive formats. Do I just take DOS binaries for those formats and hack into them to run them in Linux, then say "x86 only guys!"? No, I fully reverse-engineer the originals and write new depackers from scratch. The MPlayer team should do the same, and stop relying on other people's binaries for their glory.

Re:The simple fact..

[rilian4]

Using one code to install multiple copies of windows is perfectly legal if you purchase a corporate code from M$. It may not be cost effective with a small amount of workstations but the practice in and of itself is not a legal issue.

Re:The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why can't each plugin tell Mplayer what capabilities it has, like Xine or XMMS does?"

Duh you answered your own question, because they don't want to reinvent the wheel (codecs).

Re:The simple fact..

[DennisZeMenace]

I never said MPlayer was perfect code. It isn't, but making a perfectly modular approach while supporting so many different formats and codecs is easier said than done. I have to agree the condecs.conf is kludgy.

Reverse-engineering is the perfect solution, but in practice it can only be done for simple things. Reverse-engineering WMV or Sorensen v3: you can't be serious, this is almost impossible unless you're either a authistic genius or somebody with inside information about how the codecs work. In the real world, those codecs will most likely NEVER be reverse engineered. And i don't think begging Microsoft and Apple/Sorensen for Linux versions will work either (laugh!). So what do you do ?

MPlayer is the only project that provides a solution. I couldn't care less how they do it.

DZM

Re:The simple fact..

[cscx]

This is perfectly legal. As long as you purchase 19 other license certificates from Microsoft. It's part of their "Volume Licensing" program. Even so, the CD Key just unlocks the CD. As long as you have unique certificates of authenticity for each box, you're OK.

Re:The simple fact..

[Adi]

Árpi didn't started the project just to harvest other people's work and "relying on other poeple's binaries for their glory". He wanted a media player that can playback all the know video formats on Linux - and at last the MPlayer team seems to succeed.

Remember: you don't have to like any free software. If you don't like it, write better!

Re:The simple fact..

[pla]

This does not at all reflect the views of the MPlayer authors.

He didn't say that the MPlayer authors don't care about licensing. He didn't say Debian doesn't care about licensing (in fact, Debian seems to insist on strict adherence to the GPL more than just about any company out there). He didn't say that most *companies* don't care about licensing issues.

He said that most PEOPLE don't care about licenses. And, I believe that holds true.

How many MP3s do you have for which you have no corresponding CD in your posession? How about ROMS for video games? Windows installations (even if you own one, do you run it on more than one computers)? How about 30-day shareware with no hard timeout, which "expired" about two years ago?

People care abour convenience and functionality. If they didn't, how many people would *BUY* Debian or RedHat CDs? I can download all of that from the net, totally legally. I can download all of the documentation (or at least comparable) as well. Why would I pay for a CD? Because $20 for a 4-8 CD set saves me several days time downloading and burning the same material. OTOH, saving $80-$160 by borrowing a friend's Windows install CD and spending 20 minutes looking on-line for a valid CD key seems very much worth it. Same for MS Office.

People pay for convenience, not because they give a damn about whether or not they legally *need* to pay. I think most people *prefer* to stay legal, given the choice with no extra cost (in time *or* money), but they won't go very far out of their way to make sure they stay legal.

Note that I don't mean this to *encourage* piracy - Just describing how I see this issue WRT other peoples' buying/stealing habits.


Now, to address the parent thread, I have an interesting question...

If the MPlayer license complies with the GPL in all regards *except* allowing binary distribution, that means the authors cannot stop me from modifying and re-releasing it under GPL-or-better terms. So why hasn't Debian done exactly that? "Nope, not MPlayer, we changed int main(int argc, char **argv) to int main(int argc, char *argv[]), much more aesthetically pleasing, and released it as DPlayer under pure GPL terms"?. Seems that the GPL allows that...

Re:The simple fact..

[sdowney]

Most of the libraries that are in the gray area are written by people who work closely with the MPlayer team anyway, and/or are designed for other projects and need heavy modifications to be used in MPlayer (one of the conflicts is just based on the absence of a ChangeLog file!!! You gotta be kidding).

Reading the thread, someone spent about 5 minutes looking at the source for mplayer. He discovered that it included code for other libraries. Those libraries had been modified, with no notice that the source had been changed, nor by who. This conflicts with the letter of the GPL.

Now, the mplayer developers claim that the authors of the the library said it was OK.

So, it it OK for someone else to make changes to the library and distribute it? Is it OK to redistribute the modified version outside of mplayer? What license applies to the modified version? Who holds copyright?

And should you take the word of the mplayer developers that everything is OK?

Would you take the word of the seller's real estate agent that a house is up to code, or do you hire an engineer?

Debian has to asses the risk for themselves. And the mplayer developers aren't being very reassuring about all the i's being dotted and t's being crossed. So it will continue to be the case that mplayer isn't distributed as part of Debian.

Life goes on.

Re:The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

How fucking weird it is that you figure the 'default' state for copyrighted material is to allow copying. Actually, if MPlayer is in violation of the GPL, then they don't have the right to distribute. What's more, nobody but the people who own the copyright on the GPL-ed code has any rights to enforcing that violation. Not you, not the debian packagers, not Dick Stallman, not Jesus, not Crazy Linus, not David Hasselhoff. Nobody. Only the owners of the code with the license that is being violated.

For example, if Martha Stewart was to write up some code and release it under the GPL, and then Pamela Anderson took that code and added to it and released the result with additional restrictions, *you* do not have any rights to that new code. What it means is that Pamela Anderson cannot distribute, it doesn't mean that you magically get the GPL enforced. Even if Martha Stewart decided to sue the fake titted bitch's ass, the only thing she could get would be: 1) actual monetary damages (err, none), 2) punative monetary damages and 3) a court order preventing Pam'sCuntSoftware from distributing the combined project. *You*, personally you, don't get anything out of it. You don't get the code, you don't get money, you don't get a blowjob, you get nothing.

GPL is not some magic form of public domain. People yak about how it's viral (it is) and how it's stupid (it is.) But it cannot forcibly make someone release code that they own the copyright on, regardless of whether it's a derivative. All it can do is prevent them from distributing. God it's fucking amazing how stupid people can be.

Re:The simple fact..

[DennisZeMenace]

If the MPlayer license complies with the GPL in all regards *except* allowing binary distribution, that means the authors cannot stop me from modifying and re-releasing it under GPL-or-better terms. So why hasn't Debian done exactly that? "Nope, not MPlayer, we changed int main(int argc, char **argv) to int main(int argc, char *argv[]), much more aesthetically pleasing, and released it as DPlayer under pure GPL terms"?. Seems that the GPL allows that...

You're right but the issue is no longer the binary distribution (that was fixed long ago). You can distribute MPlayer binaries if you want, except you'll get flamed by MPlayer's authors if you don't package it properly :-) (and it's somewhat tricky). I believe the main issues are :

- MPlayer uses ffmpeg (libavcodec) which some people say has patent issues wrt MPEG4. Xine uses the same library, as it's the only Linux-native DivX decoder (and therefore fastest)

- Mplayer uses modified code from libmpeg2, but didn't include a ChangeLog. No big deal as they work closely with the libmpeg2 project and it'll be resolved in a future version of libmpeg2

That's about it.

DZM

Re:The simple fact..

[blakestah]

Don't you get that? If the MPlayer authors actually cared about well-written software, it would use carefully crafted, modular APIs between all the component parts. I could add Quicktime codecs to MPlayer just by copying a hypothetical mp_qtime.so into lib/mplayer/codecs.

You don't use Mplayer, do you? To add a codec, simply copy it to the codec directory. End of story. BTW, Mplayer supports all Quicktime codecs.

Apple don't permit you to hack into the Sorensen codecs and get them to work outside Quicktime Player.

Actually, so far, they have. The legal arguments are several.

1) The binary is the same as Windows, and performs the same functions, and is freely downloadable from the provider. Apple. Provided the user does the download, no big deal.

2) The code itself uses a plug-in architecture for Windows and Quicktime dlls, so that copyright issues on different sides of the plug-in interface are separated.

So, Mplayer is GPL, but can still use Windows dlls, when they are available.

The MPlayer team should do the same, and stop relying on other people's binaries for their glory.

They DID reverse engineer SVQ1. And, others are coming, but until they are available, the movies may still be played using the Windows binary codecs, available via plug-in.

Also, the source only re-distribution requirement is now gone, and the binary optimizes for hardware on the fly.

Mplayer is a very impressive piece of software engineering.

Re:The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

2) The code itself uses a plug-in architecture for Windows and Quicktime dlls, so that copyright issues on different sides of the plug-in interface are separated.

The main copyright issue is that these guys distribute hacked (c)Microsoft codecs right from their webpage, which is illegal.

1) The binary is the same as Windows

It says right there that their "Win32 Codecs" are "UNUSABLE FOR WINDOWS !"

Re:The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

I donno, I'd say XFree86 is way more impressive.

Re:The simple fact..

[KeyserDK]

It really is a very impressive piece of engineering. It is also an impressive work of alianating everyone else.

However saying 'this codec works' is not enough. I agree they have always have the upper hand on codecs, but why should the interface be so horrible?

Compare it to a player like Totem: http://www.hadess.net/totem.php3 which currently uses the xine framwork. It plays everything but quicktime / parses asx.

I recomended you look at xine or gstreamer for some solutions with a real future as a framework for multimedia.

Re:The simple fact..

[terrymr]

Windows itself is not available on any Microsoft volume license ..... upgrades are perversely but the base product has to be purchased either with the computer or as a retail box. However if you have enough licenses there probably isn't a problem with using the same code for all of them.

Re:The simple fact..

[kasperd]

Apple don't permit you to hack into the Sorensen codecs and get them to work outside Quicktime Player.

Who needs Apple's permissions? Where I live it is explicitly permitted by law, and the law even says that right cannot be given up by agreement.

Re:The simple fact..

[Anonymous Coward]

And if they did so as well, meaning reverse-engineer everything they interface with, and rewrite it, they would end up the way DVD-Jon did, at the receiving end of a lawsuit...

I concur, MPlayer is a spaghetti code, even the authors admit it. But it is there. If it was properly written, probably it would not be here at all, it would not be ready at all, because coding according to specifications and ENFORCING them is a bit slower thing than just to code if you are familiar with the whole code, and competent enough not to botch up things.

Actually the whole problem with MPlayer was that MPlayer was refused because of DFSG since it would have included some files which could not be distributed by Debian.

They ACCEPTED this but pointed out that some other packages already included that code, therefore that code is also violating DFSG.

Re:The simple fact..

[nr]

Agree with your post. One of the main reasons for being "source only" and "no-binaries" is becouse Mplayer needs to be tailour made to take fully advance of all the power and features your current architecture and CPU has.

Thats why you dont want to install a binary release of Mplayer.

You dont want to use a P-II compiled version of Mplayer on a P-III, P4 or AMD Athlon processor and vice versa.

At build time Mplayer is custom-built to take fully advantage of MMX, MMX2, SSE, 3Dnow and other features your specific CPU got to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your CPU, you do not get that with a binary installation.

Re:The simple fact..

[DavidTC]

That's because there is no install. The binary files are identical, they're just coied out of all their packages and installers and lumped in one package.

If you want to download the binaries for mplayer and spend ten hours trying to get them to work under Windows when you don't have an installer to set your registery up right or put the files int he right places, hey, more power to you.

Re:The simple fact..

[DickBreath]

....because MPlayer is badly written....
....MPlayer is famous simply mostly because it got Win32 codecs to work outside Windows. Kudos to them for doing so...

Assuming these statements are both true, then it would seem obvious that a useful approach would be to make a new plug in for other projects (XMMS?) that borrows the mplayer technique of running the windows binary codec. The plug in can be legitimately distributed as both open source and binaries with some other multimedia player. Obtaining the windows file and putting it into the right folder would be a trivial exercise for the user -- perhaps even automatically scripted -- as some distributions have done for obtaining NVidia drivers and Microsoft free fonts.

Re:The simple fact..

[dossen]

They DID reverse engineer SVQ1

Not to nitpick, but I think it was Xine that first reverse engineered SVQ1.

Quoting the MPlayer homepage (news 2002.06.27):
Sorenson v1 (SVQ1) support - based on Xine's Sorenson v1 (SVQ1) decoder, we implemented it in MPlayer.

Re:The simple fact..

[Grishnakh]

It's only illegal in oppressive countries like the USA. That's why they link to a site in a free country where you can download the codecs from. And also unlike the USA, I imagine there's no law against linking in the country where their homepage is located (Hungary).

Re:The simple fact..

[Grishnakh]

What bizarre, mythical land of freedom do you live in? It certainly can't be the USA, where "freedom" rings hollow after decades of its erosion by corporations bent on turning us all into mindless consumers of their soulless products, willing to part with our hard-earned currency at the slightest provocation by marketing which takes advantage of our gullibility and lack of reasoning engendered by a public education system designed to mold us into this role.

Re:The simple fact..

[kasperd]

What bizarre, mythical land of freedom do you live in?

Denmark... It is 37 in our law on copyright.

*GASP*!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

A flamewar??? On a DEBIAN mailing list???? Oh my!

GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

See, this is why the GPL is such a terrible license.

The GPL doesn't give anyone the freedom to limit distribution. If this were possible, you could for instance, charge for the right to download binaries. The GPL destroys private business just like communism. Why sign your rights over to RMS?

Industry standard EULAs, like you find on Windows or OS X, come with this restriction *already*. These are clearly superior licenses.

Don't fall for the RMS ramblings. Avoid the GPL at all costs for your software.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[grub]

Avoid the GPL at all costs for your software.

but.. but... "GPL" and "costs" in the same sentence... me is confuzed

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Jason1729]

If I'm a developer writing code that I'm willing to release freely for altruistic reasons, I don't want someone else taking my program, modifying it, and selling it for a profit. That's why I'd put it under the GPL.

You're saying you should have the freedom to profit from my work against my wishes.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:GPL is not "free"

[TheCarp]

Um not exactly. The GPL says you can't restrict ANYONE ELSE from distributing.

So you CAN cgharge a fee to download. You can even package it up and sell it on store shelves. You CANNOT stop anyone who gets it from you from doing the same (or giving it away for free).

Now, you may dislike that too, but the specific restriction that you cited (that its not possible to charge for binaries) doesn't exist.

In fact, the original author can chose to distribute under a non-gpl license in addition to the GPL if he likes.

And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.

the mplayer people ask why "Debian legal" thinks it knows better hwat the GPL means than they do. Its not that at all. Its that debian, as a distributer, at som elevel has to answer the question "Do we have license to distribute what we are distributing" and they are basing that decision solely on the text of the licenses involved. Its that simple.

Debian, by policy, does not violate software licenses. Quite simple. Debian also does not accept special licensing terms (ie "You the debian group may distribute this, but noone else may") as they are. Since debian is doing the distributing, its the debain people (not the authors of the stuff being distributed) that have to make the call as to whether the license gives them permission to distribute since it is debian that puts its neck on the chopping block if it distributes something they have no permission to distribute.

-Steve
(a rather inactive debian developer, who used to read the debian mailing lists and thinks this issue is nothing new)

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm a developer writing code that I'm willing to release freely for altruistic reasons, I don't want someone else taking my program, modifying it, and selling it for a profit. That's why I'd put it under the GPL.

Then you need to reread the GPL because it allows anyone to do just that. The restriction is that they have to release the source to any modifications that they make to your program, not on whether or not they can sell derived works.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Then you chose the wrong license. GPL does not bar anyone from "taking [your] program, modifying it, and selling it for a profit." The only restriction is that they must provide the source, if requested, and retain the original license. Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, and every other Linux distribution that you can purchase, do exactly this.

When I release GPL code, I don't care who does what with it so long as it remains available to everyone. The money is secondary. The code that I release on a subscription model is not GPL for obvious reasons. That money pays my bills. Not every project needs the GPL; use it where it makes sense.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[The Bungi]

but.. but... "GPL" and "costs" in the same sentence... me is confuzed

I don't think I get your point. AFAICT, the GPL dictates that software under it is free as freedom to do "stuff" with it but not necessarily free in monetary terms. I.e., you can sell GPL software, correct?

So when you say "costs" are you referring somehow to the fact that the GPL effectively dictates that software licensed under it *cannot* be sold and purchased as a commodity just like any other product or service?

I'm "confuzed".

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Jason1729]

My understanding of the GPL is that as soon as that person re-sells one copy of my code, their version becomes freely distributable and the person who bought it can give it away to as many people as they want. As far as I'm concerned, this is good enough.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:GPL is not "free"

[di0s]

You weren't in India a few months ago, were you?

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

He gets flaimbait because he thinks that the GPL is terrible. Would it be the same if he said "Windows liscensing is terrible"? no.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

This has been covered so many times. This particular defense of the GPL is so unbelievably inane and thoughtless that it really begs if people are thinking or if they're just parroting what Richard Stallman et. all tells them.

If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT fucktardis.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[jaavaaguru]

If this were possible, you could for instance, charge for the right to download binaries.

You could charge for the bandwidth. Just like Sun claimed that you can order a free Solaris CD on x86 from their website.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Mr. Slippery]

If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.

Well, no, that's not clear at all, since those deltas have no value in themselves. What is being sold is a derivative work of the original.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Synn]

And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.

Debian could do what they do with qmail, just distribute a qmail-src package.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

It's completely clear. If I took the Apache source and added a bit of functionality to reverse the output (It'll be the new LMTH server), the Apache source is no less available than it was before, and the only marketable aspect of my project is what is above and beyond Apache. Indeed, not only does this prove that the delta is all that has value, but it disproves that someone is making money on someone else's work because that person's work is still available: Its net value is $0. Clearly the value is what is above and beyond it.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Waffle Iron]

If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.

That's what I tried to tell the federal agents when they came to confiscate the whole production run of my new video, "Mickey Mouse plays Twelve Favorite Metallica Hits", which I had produced and offered for sale on E-Bay.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Gordonjcp]

Nope, sorry. You can sell GPLed code written by *anybody*. You just can't say it's yours.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[DeadInSpace]

Debian does that. It provides a pine396-src package, which contains the source and patchfiles.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

That's the most sophmoronic logic I've ever heard.

The fact that something can be obtained for free does NOT mean that the value is zero. Poor Understanding of Economics Mistake Number One.

Different people value things differently and for different reasons. This is why arbitration conditions exist. The value of GPL'd code is not zero. It's "whatever the market will bear," just like everything else. You and I could sell the same GPL'd code, and I guarantee that I could fetch a higher price. Explain that.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[t]

When I release GPL code, I don't care who does what with it so long as it remains available to everyone.

The GPL doesn't guarantee this. It may seem like it does, but in reality all it says is that the source must be made available to whoever you gave/sold a binary version too. For instance, if I take your GPL code, and add something stupendous, and sell it to one person for a shit load of money, there's nothing you can do to get those changes. You could ask that one person for the source, they might give it to you, but they also might tell you to fuck off.

This example is probably more recognizable if I recast it as a big company that perhaps uses GPL modified source to do some wacky data manipulation, perhaps a video effect company. Lets say that they take your precious GPL source, make some changes, use it to make millions doing video effects for some movie. They don't have to give anyone that source code. Not even you. Almost becomes like the BSD license doesn't it?

That is why so much software from .edu's contains the clause that commerical use requires paying bucks to license the use of the software.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that something can be obtained for free does NOT mean that the value is zero.

Actually, in any market economy that's exactly what it means.

The value of anything is what it sells for. For example, my soul is invaluable, because I won't sell it at any price. My used DVD player has a value of about $50, because that's what I'm willing to sell it for, and somebody is willing to buy it at that price.

As for GPL'ed code. The value of the code is roughly zero. It's free for the taking, provided you have the resources to download it, or have access to a buddy's install disks. If you can sell it for more, it is only by adding value, such as the promise of support, or whatever value the buying party puts on having a good business relationship with you. The GPL'ed code is not what they are buying, because they can get that for free.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

Sophmoronic...cute. Was that the Troll Word of the Week?

Value in the context of this discussion is in regards to monetary value: How much someone is willing to pay for something. If someone takes the Apache, which I can freely download for $0, and sells it, clearly they must be providing an additional service (such as CD-ROM distribution), otherwise they will have, oh, about 0 sales.

You and I could sell the same GPL'd code, and I guarantee that I could fetch a higher price. Explain that.

Because you have an incredibly degree of arrogance and an overwhelming self-confidence that leads you to make absurd boasts to people you know nothing about?

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Errrrr, no. You can charge for the right to download binaries... but you still have to release the source.

That is why distributions can sell a cdrom with Linux and utilities on it.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you can't keep the person to whom you sell it from distributing it for free. I.e. once you GPL code, you lose the ability to recover from people "pirating" it (obviously, pirate isn't really the right term, since it is legal and appropriate under the GPL).

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

you are the absolute most stupid person on this planet...

what is your IQ???? about 80?

please why dont you actually READ the GPL before you shoot of your idiot mouth.

Cripes, I am tired of morons like you and I am now going to make it my life's goal to publically humiliate people like you.... GPL bashers that are no smarter than a box of rocks.

fricking idiot.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Your understanding of market economies is a bit thin. You hint at the actual situation when you say that it is "roughly zero," recognizing that it is neither zero, nor actually quantifiable. This is because a unique market exists for every two people at every geographic location at every moment in time. Specifically, you're post fails to account for a number of very important factors including:

1. information costs
2. transportation costs
3. any number of utility functions that may apply, not the least of which is perceived value and trust that the code is what it claims.

A glass of water is free, by law, in some U.S. states and yet you can still find it in bottles for a dollar at the corner convenience store. Ask a guy dying of thirst in a remote desert about the value of water, monetarily or otherwise. Why, it's $0, of course.

Two copies of the same code will have different values to different people in different circumstances. That basic principle is why market economies exist.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Your argument is sophomoric, having only the appearance of a logical basis when in fact it is completely fallacious.

Believing that the ability to download a piece of software for "free" makes the "market value" zero shows a complete lacking of understanding of the words "free" (as in beer) and "market value." Moron may have been a strong word; ignorant would have been more accurate.

The supply is never infinite, and the price is never zero. There is no single "market value."

As for boasting, it's wholly unnecessary. You could make the same general statement and be 100% correct. The fact that you do not understand that is due to your limited understanding of "market value."

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

Believing that the ability to download a piece of software for "free" makes the "market value" zero shows a complete lacking of understanding of the words "free" (as in beer) and "market value."

Market value - The amount that a seller may expect to obtain for merchandise, services, or securities in the open market.

Value - Monetary or material worth: the fluctuating value of gold and silver.

Is this really that difficult to understand, or have you dug yourself so far into your little hole of blinding arrogance that you can't see something so brutally obvious? Firstly, I never said "the ability to download": We're specifically talking about GPL software where one has the full ability to download, modify, and redistribute. Don't try to make my claims any more generic than they are in an attempt to weasle under the actual point.

The market value, or value, of GPLd, freely avaialable and redistributable software is $0.00. Now maybe someone put said software on a CD and is selling it for a convenience price, but they are not making money on the value of the software, but rather the convenience/medium. The going price for Gentoo linux is $0.00. The going price for Apache is $0.00. The going price for GCC is $0.00. If someone charges, clearly the market will only bear what they have added above and beyond the market value of that which they've built upon.

Please feel free to repeat your blindingly ridiculous claim that I'm misunderstanding what market value is.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

I should also add that code is not a commodity; treating it as such will result in bad logical arguments. You cannot subtract the value of two distinct items and come to any conclusion about their relative values.

Secondly, the statement that "the GPL'd code is not what they are buying because they can get [it] for free," is incorrect. They cannot get it for free. Nothing is free.

After adding bandwidth costs, CD replication costs, all the time spent during the transaction, you might come up with a value of say, $10.00. Repeat with a stream of zeroes, and you might have a valuation of $-1.00, (ie. you'd have to pay someone to take such a CD). By this similarly flawed logic, the value of the GPL'd code is now $11.00, at least as compared to empty data.

Economic theory just doesn't work this way.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Grishnakh]

I can't believe so many people have such a hard time with the GPL and the concepts it embodies.

If I write some code, and some company modifies it and uses it internally, and never distributes it, it really doesn't affect me and I shouldn't care. Sure, they're profiting off my work, in a way, but I've released that software as Free in order to enrich the community, not myself. If that company sells it to just one person, it still doesn't affect me; it's only between those two.

The problem is if that company takes my code, modifies it, then tries to sell it back to me. If they give me the source at this time, then great--I've paid for their improvements, and I can take that source code and improve it even further. If I can't see the code though, it's unfair since the original codebase was my own.

The other main reason the GPL is useful is to prevent a group of people from working on some code, then some other company taking that, making proprietary changes to it, then mass-marketing it and making it a standard. This prevents interoperability. With the code GPLed, this is prevented because the company's changes have to be released in source form to anyone who has access to the binaries, so others will be able to write software that interoperates with the product.

The bottom line is the GPL allows someone to write Free software, and guarantee that it doesn't become unFree. If some companies don't like that because they can't unfairly profit off someone else's free work, then they're free to write their own from-scratch implementation that does the same thing. Of course this will cost more, but no one's entitled to a free lunch.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Your understanding of economic theory is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day. You are misapplying commodity theory, a common mistake, but worse because you fail to realize that software cannot be a commodity. You've misapplied the theory and arrived at an incorrect conclusion.

This morning, March wheat opened at $3.11 on the CBOT (Chicago) and $3.80 in Minneapolis. There are many types of wheat, but in this case, these two could be considered fungible*; it is therefore reasonable to suggest that the difference in price could include transportation costs. This is a correct application of the theory.

Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity. If it is not a commodity, and you apply commodity theory to it, you will arrive at an incorrect, illogical conclusion. Hence, I accused you of making a fallacious argument.

To further press the matter, you provide a common dictionary reference for market value while failing to understand that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code. In one sense, there is no single market because there is no central clearing of transactions, and in another sense, there are hundreds of millions of markets, each independently governed by supply and demand. Consequently, there is no single market price, and it is certainly not zero. The fact that I can sell original Redhat CDs at cost and exact duplicates at half cost, speaks volumes. If they were fungible, this would not be possible. As it is, they are not even in the same market.

Your understanding of monetary value is completely one dimensional, literally. You do not take into account who the transaction involved, what the circumstances were, or when the transaction occurred. The going price for Gentoo Linux is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for GCC is not zero, it is what the market will bear. Your understanding of what constitutes a market is completely flawed so your understanding of monetary value is likewise flawed.

-Hope

fungible - being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

By "available to everyone", I don't mean that private changes must be returned to the public. I mean precisely what the GPL stipulates, that if the code makes it back to the public, it will be available to everyone, and under the same license. Private sales don't concern me. Preventing the purchaser from returning the code to the public does. If he has no intention of doing that, then that's perfectly fine.

Besides which, if someone thinks that they can take my code and their million dollars to turn a profit, more power to them. Since I probably would never have entered into a business arrangement with them in the first place, it's not really my loss. I'm plenty busy investing my code, time, and money in other dealings.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[Mike Markley]

Also worth noting that more modern versions of Pine can be found as a source-only package called, simply, "pine."

apt-get source pine, dpkg-buildpackage :).

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day.

With all due respect to your extensive experience: Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse? Is your method of trolling to say as much as possible without actually saying anything? Let's get to the core of this.

Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity.

Have you really managed to miss the point so entirely? My original point was that the value of a derivative of a free software work is in the change (because the original is still freely available), and here you are to claim that the value is the change. Huh?

that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code

Sure there is: The authors and creators have openly made these products available, for $0.00, with no usage limitations. Here's the open market for Apache.

The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear.

Sigh. And the market will bear $0.00 because the authors and creators have released these products freely.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Your position is that the value of the derivative code can be determined by subtracting the monetary values of the two products. That "idea" is basic commodity theory. Source code, GPL'd or otherwise, is not a commodity, and you are therefore "comparing apples and oranges." It's really that simple.

Using the same flawed "logic," you can prove black is white, Ray Charles is God, or anything else that trips your fancy. This is called making "fallacious arguments" which is what I accused you of from the beginning.

The fact that I can sell Apache webserver for more than zero dollars blows a hole through your argument. There are markets for this software in which you do not participate for which the cost will never be zero. To state otherwise is simply incorrect.

-Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[ergo98]

Ray Charles IS God...the God of funk.

Re:GPL is not "free"

[HopeOS]

Well. On that we probably agree. -Hope

Re:GPL is not "free"

[001010011010]

Consider if the fact the GPL destroys private business is bad at all. Btw communism is something totally different. It is the idea of an (though impossible) ideal community that cannot be reached - instead, it gets stucked as soon as there are people who control the process and get in charge. The GPL, instead, is an instrument to fulfill the will of the copyright holder of the software it applies to.

How can one declare a license "superior" if people have different opinions about life in general? Isn't it anyone's freedom to decide if it's good for his or her goals to support proprietary software developing companies with his/her public domain-like software or prevent that (at least as far as possible) with a GPL-like license?

Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[James_Duncan8181]

the M-Player dev team certainly seem to have a somewhat flaky grasp of FREE software if they attempt to retrict distribution. This does not appear to be followed up though, it is more of a request. The PLF certanly have binaries ready to go (they provided my copy) and I just look at Stallman's work with the GPL and grin as the freedom of software is protected again.

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[tzanger]

the M-Player dev team certainly seem to have a somewhat flaky grasp of FREE software if they attempt to retrict distribution.

*cough*qmail*cough*

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

qmail isn't GPL, whereas mplayer is.

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[jcast]

Why do you say *cough*qmail*cough*?

Or at least that's Eliza's comment.

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[Adi]

Next Slashdot vote:

Who is the most arrogant amongst open source developers?

1) Dan J. Berstein
2) MPlayer team
3) Theo de Raadt
4) CowboyNeal :)

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, they are unable to stop you distributing a binary (assuming of course you don't include the windows DLL, which are under different licenses). However there is also nothing saying they have to support you if you do so.

They cop a lot of slack because people use binary versions that were distributed without all of the supported codecs (for legal reasons). I'd imagine the number of requests for getting quicktime working when they didn't compile the quicktime support must be very frustrating.

However once again the mplayer developers have responded in a childish manner. I'm not sure if some sort of cultural and language differences are involved, but I strongly believe it to be a case of a small number of arrogant egotistical morons ruining the reputation of all.

Now that the support most useful formats, I wonder if they'll pull their finger out and get around to re-writing the core, revolving around a plugin structure, for codecs, control, and audio/video drivers. This is much preferrred to the current setup by autoconf.

Re:Umm...isn't that the point of the GPL?

[Anonymous DWord]

5) ESR

Obligatory VLC Reference

[philovivero]

Not VNC, VLC. Videolan Client.

It's a way to stream video content from a server and view it on a client, but as a nice side-effect, it's a DVDCSS-enabled DVD player, and a pretty good one at that. It's not skinnable, it uses your built-in OS widgets, so it's not as ugly as all the other media players. It looks like it belongs on your desktop with all your other apps.

Mplayer seems to have much better DivX/MJPEG/blah/blah support than VLC, however, so you can't just go whacking mplayer from your HDD. Sorry.

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[bicho]

mplayer has actually an gui, and it is pretty themable/skinnable (I think much in the way gqmpeg or kjöfol is)

and If i remember right, it will also alow you to output to a file in some other format.

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[tzanger]

mplayer has actually an gui, and it is pretty themable/skinnable (I think much in the way gqmpeg or kjöfol is)

Like many people, I despise the GUI that they've come out with. Tiny buttons, can't read worth a shit, get in the way, really. I have set my wmv/avi/mpeg/divx/whatever mimetypes to invoke mplayer in a shell and use the default keyset to navigate. Sure beats YAPIGUI (Yet Another Poorly-Implemented GUI).

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[jolan]

Not to mention that it's less portable.

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[King of the World]

In that case, try Gstreamer.

I would be using GStreamer myself, but they don't have anything available for Mandrake. They point users to Mandrake cooker! ... sometimes I cry for OSS usability.

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[uncleFester]

It's not skinnable...

uuh, don't you realize this is a good thing? :)

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[PurpleBob]

Uh, didn't you read the rest of his comment where he said exactly that?

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[G�tz]

I'm the packager of GStreamer for Mandrake cooker. I would release binaries for Mandrake 9.0 if it was worth the trouble. GStreamer is under heavy development and often broken. If I also would release 9.0 binaries I would have more work and more emails from users who cannot get it to work, unlike Cooker users who should know what they're doing.

Re:Obligatory VLC Reference

[King of the World]

Thanks for the response,

It's just a tad sad that there isn't a media player for Mandrake with a usable interface :(

That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[Chacham]

That's why we use "unofficial" debs. Sometimes very scary, such as in Ximian. But, for mplayer this site does well.

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[gibber]

One should note that this is what instigated the whole thread in the first place. Gabucino posted to debian-devel because he couldn't get Christian Marillat to respond to the noted problems with his packages.

Read the thread here

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[asuffield]

Amusingly enough, the thread in question started because some mplayer developers didn't like Marillat and decided to flame him in public, and people told them to go shove it.

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[SquadBoy]

But of course as the devs point out you *really* want to compile anyway. They include the Debian rules so it is pretty easy and fast. That is what I and most people I know do.

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[On Lawn]

I agree. As I saw it...

Gabucino: No thats not true becuase of X, Y and Z.

Debian Zealot: Noo! I can't trust your information now becuase your just wrong! ...repeated over and over again.

----------------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[bfree]

I think the most interesting thing about mplayer is going to be the next few months. They are realistically approaching a 1.0 release and at that point they will probably be able to sit back and look at some of the issues Debina might love to "fix". In the meantime, I think we will see mplayer charge forward in terms of stability and cleanliness. Everything points to the fact they've been concentrating on getting the codec count and just putting a minimal of effort into the UI. All in all the ui isn't too attrocious (when it compiles and works, debian source compiler here), though I think I would prefer it if there was a native toolkit option (but I suspect they could appear rapidly if mplayer manages to do a quarter decent job of stabilising things for a 1.0 tree). I actually wish the mplayer devleopers would find someone to setup their own apt-get.org archive for the "official mplayer" debian binaries. If they are building good binaries for debian, non-intrusively and that comply with debian standards, debian will release it. Instead of flaming the person who is unofficially packaging the player for debian who won't release it, they should produce packages, propose a maintainer and maintain the player (including security updates) until debian produce binaries they are happy with! If they want to protect how well their work appears, then they should really do this with binaries (and source of course) for all distros. It would help if dpkg ((gnome-)apt(itude)) supported singed packages and then you could let your machine run rampant on sources only allowing packages signed by trusted developers to be installed.

Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs

[den_erpel]

I must admit that I haven't followed the flame in real time on debian-devel (it's archived though). I would just want to point out that:

1. Christian offers a real and useful service to the debian users. Not all of them compile their kernel and software from source.

2. Next to mplayer, he also packages some other software (e.g. lame) which have been removed from debian, but which are ubiquitious. I hope that in term ogg will be a viable alternative, but 'it is getting there', not yet.

3. I've worked with Christian on some 'problem' packages (dependency on mp3lame). I've never had any problems communicating with him and he was always eager to help. He has always answered in a polite way to my questions and offered help AND rearranged his packages to meet my package needs.

4. As a result of my personal experiences AND following the mplayer site and developers a bit, I can only assume their attitude in mails. I wonder if they ever heard of the term _polite_ questions or remark. You should sometimes read the remarks and replys debian devolopers get from some upstream authors.

Fact of the matter is that, unless I have a terrible character judgment, one should be very careful in pointing fingers to Christian, he was packaging video/audio {de|en}coding software before any other distribution heard of these and was and still is offering a real service to the debian community.

Flaming of Xine

[James_Duncan8181]

Can't the guy go two messages without flaming Xine? I just love the usenet 14 year-olds feel.

Re:Flaming of Xine

[Anonymous Coward]

They're probably just threatened by software that is more featureful, includes a good user interface, and is actually Free.

Re:Flaming of Xine

[fault0]

Except that in this case, mplayer supports quite a bit more codecs than xine does.

Of course, xine has a non-assholy devel team, which gives it lots of brownie points.

Re:Flaming of Xine

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

..includes a good user interface..

You're kidding, right? On the whole, Xine's interface is not "terrible", but it's file-selector widgets blow goats.

Re:Flaming of Xine

[cscx]

I'll second this. I don't even think you can resize the form, nor use the mouse wheel!

Re:Flaming of Xine

[G�tz]

You can fix the interface by using one of the frontends, like Totem. However, I've tested both xine and MPlayer extensively and found MPlayer much better regarding performance, number of features and stability.

There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with Debian-legal, and have to say they are being generous by only pointing out the obvious problem with the GPL. The biggest problem with MPlayer (and the one that it's developers can't fix so easily) is that much of the code was appropriated from other projects that lack proper (or in some cases, any) licenses. I'm sure if the MPlayer people were to say that "OK, MPlayer is pure GPL" that the next question will be to what extent they even have the right to do that. It's unfortunate, but because proper attention was not paid during development, MPlayer will probably be a permanently grey-area application legally.

Re:There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[digital photo]

Well, there is always the option of rewriting the code in question from scratch so that it works with the existing program code which is GPL compatible.

It would take time, but it would not be impossible. Though I would guess that alot of the library and codec stuff would be kinda hard to recode from scratch. ^_^;;

Re: There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[Black Parrot]

> MPlayer will probably be a permanently grey-area application legally.

My concern is where all those .dll's came from. They say that they won't work under Windows, but that just leaves me wondering why they're .dll's to start with, instead of .so's or .a's.

The names of the .dll's suggest that that's where all the codec work is done. One suspects a bit of thievery going on here.

Re: There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Those .dll's aren't included with the mplayer source. Mplayer can play avi/xcd/(s)vcd/dvd/ogm/... just fine without em.

Re:There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[On Lawn]

Also, about six months ago one of their libraries they linked to went GPL compatible. I wish I remember the name of it. So why not just LGPL it? Or even freebsd their code?

If that isn't good enough then all I can say is, "come on Debian, be reasonable." Information wants to be free but you're trying set all sorts of childish stipulations on that freedom.

Re: There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

The names of the .dll's suggest that that's where all the codec work is done.

Nope, only the work on codecs that have not been successfully reverse-engineered yet. A great deal of the codecs out there are currently handled by libavcodec, from the looks of things.

One suspects a bit of thievery going on here.

This one doesn't. :-) The .dll's are only there to enable playback of not-yet-reverse-engineered formats. Given that MPlayer's key goal is "play as many different media types as possible, especially those that otherwise can only be played on Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime", this seems like a perfectly valid approach until native decoders can be worked out.

And I wouldn't say that MPlayer is "thieving" from ffmpeg (whence libavcodec comes) either. Not only because libavcodec is FOR other projects to use for audio and video encoding and decoding, but because I've noticed that one or more of the MPlayer developers seem to be active participants in libavcodec development as well...

Re: There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[bfree]

Looking at Irish Law I can't decide whether I can use mplayer or not! Guess what, IANAL! The relevant law (from bailii) is:

COPYRIGHT AND RELATED RIGHTS ACT 2000 - SECT 81
Lawful copies of computer programs.

81.- (1) It is not an infringement of the copyright in a computer program for a lawful user-
(a) to make a permanent or temporary copy of the whole or a part of the computer program by any means or in any form, or
(b) to make a translation, adaptation, arrangement or any other alteration of the computer program and to copy the results thereof,
to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs where the following conditions are complied with:
(i) those acts are performed by the lawful user or on his or her behalf by a person authorised to do so;
(ii) the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not previously been available to the person referred to in subparagraph (i); and
(iii) those acts are confined to the parts of the original program which are necessary to achieve interoperability.
(2) Subsection (1) shall not permit the information obtained through its application-
(a) to be used other than to achieve the interoperability of the independently created computer program,
(b) to be given to persons other than those referred to in that subsection, except where necessary for the interoperability of the independently created computer program, or
(c) to be used for the development, production or marketing of a computer program substantially similar in its expression, or for any other act which infringes copyright.

Now it all seems good up to 81.2.c which seems pretty damning! Hmmm time to read up some more on my "good?" legal system (I don't believe for a minute it is but figuring out how bad it is kills me)?

Re:There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[digital photo]

If that isn't good enough then all I can say is, "come on Debian, be reasonable." Information wants to be free but you're trying set all sorts of childish stipulations on that freedom.

Hmm... well, here's the thing. Debian represents the effort to protect that freedom. I agree that it can be a hinderance in terms of getting things one likes to be included, but when the companies and corporations come down trying to enforce one thing or another, Debian can keep their distro "free as in freedom" because they stuck to their rules and licenses.

I guess one can say that they are being reasonable by being very clear cut about it. This makes it difficult for projects with codes of various backgrounds and licenses, but it makes it so that the whole of their distro is clean(legally) and clean(operationally). It helps to keep the ability of the information in the distro to be free.

The stipulations they set aren't childish in anyway. They are the requirements of their distribution, which is that code/software added to their distro needs to be GPL compabitible.

Re:There are other legal problems with MPlayer

[On Lawn]

Hmm... well, here's the thing. Debian represents the effort to protect that freedom.

Your talking to someone very familiar with the project. I realize their cautious nervous attitude. But this is a case where they are whining and complaining about the past. Article 6 should be thrown out of the GPL, and is its most legally shakey ground anyway.

"free as in freedom" because they stuck to their rules and licenses.

Yeah, the old party line. I respect them for their zeal and their thouroghness, but not their arrogance for "free means free for me" attitude. Freedom is give and take, and calling someone a bad developer becuase he would rather you compile the code then grab a binary is not "freedom".

They have the same problem with DJB as I recall.

The stipulations they set aren't childish in anyway.

In some sence, no stipulations are childish. Just making a stipulation is a step above being childish, and that seems to be the ground you are coming from here. However, calling these stipulations a guarding of freedom in general is to me "childish".

They are the requirements of their distribution, which is that code/software added to their distro needs to be GPL compabitible.

I laugh every time I install debian and see "Do you want to include non-free material?" with a default set to "no". Then they attack programs and companies for being misleading, and choosing options for people. But Debian seems to justify this in an aristocratic "we're doing whats best for you".

How is that misleading? Non-free is free, if my mother was installing debian she wouldn't understand that those programs come at no cost. Nor would she be into re-distribution. Of course FSF, with an accord from Debian would argue their definition of freedom is *the* definition. How ironic that a organization would rather spell linux with a GNU, yet consider their definition of freedom so universal that they deride those that say GNU/Freedom as mocking.

Its long been their achilise heal, their shiboleth and their sword, and the spring of youth (as in adolescent behavior). Its what it all comes down to isn't it? Anyway I've diverged further from this then I wanted. MPlayer being yet another flame casualty of this crusade is annoying. Even when they come into compliance, some fenatical group would say "but you once decided to violate the GPL, a curse on you forever". Their lack of forgiveness is pitiful.

MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[shepd]

I'm not sure what, exactly, you are saying about MPlayer, considering they link to sites with binaries.

If they had a problem with distributing binaries, why would they link to them?

Sounds VERY fishy to me.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[HuruRudo]

If I understand it right, the developers weren't distributing the binaries *until* they ironed out all the legal issues with the non-GPL code they included in their tree.

Binary packages are not an issue now, as they claim the code is 100% "GPL compliant".

BTW, mplayer has been included in the latest SuSE Linux.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[jjermann]

Yes, unfortunately :(

It's an unuseable crippled version. The results were unnecessary bugreports of Suse users who couldn't "play DVDs/whatever". At the end most of them compiled it again themself.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[colinleroy]

RTFA, that's not mplayer developers who don't want to distribute binaries, that's debian.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[shepd]

>RTFA, that's not mplayer developers who don't want to distribute binaries, that's debian.

Well... I'm reading the article (what there is of it, which is pretty thin).

Nope. Still really unclear as to what the author's point is, even with the links.

It really seems to me the complaint of the poster was that mplayer's authors won't allow binary distribution of it under section 6 of the GPL. It can't be the debian people complaining, unless their complaint is that mplayer is refusing to allow binary redistribution (which my links clearly show they don't mind) because they didn't create mplayer. Either that or the mplayer authors are deeply bigoted against Debian, in which case I can understand their pain and bitching and moaning, but that doesn't mean Debian can't just go ahead and do it anyways.

I'm still as bewlidered as ever as to where this complaint came from. I'm looking all over the place and all I see is snippets of people debating a topic -- I don't see anything said hard and fast "If you distribute Mplayer we will hate you for life" or something like that. There's lots of complaints about the possibility of Debian mixing non-GPL code in their distribution, which I can understand.

The only complaint I see in that thread is that MPlayer doesn't work properly in binary format. Well, that's not a violation of the GPL. It might be a violation of any rules about making quality code, but since when has the GPL guaranteed a quality product?

Maybe you could provide me a link that can provide a more clear insight to what I'm missing, because I obviously can't find it.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[Anonymous Coward]

I said this to debian-legal before this story broke and I'm surprised as anyone why the slashdot commenters didn't care to look into the issue before posting....

well, maybe I'm not that surprised, and nobody else is either.

Seth Woolley

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[colinleroy]

In fact mplayer developers would like mplayer to be distributed.

However it isn't included yet in debian due to grey areas like sorenson or asf decoding (and other things i can't remember, but there are a lot).
If mplayer was included in debian it would be a stripped-down binary version ("capable of playing mpeg1 and indeo5 videos"); This (the strip-down) is mplayer's developers problem (hell, would you like a distro to include the software you spend so much time developing, only after having rendered it useless ?).

Precompiled binaries work quite nice these days (i use Dominik official RPMs on my PC and they work as fine as the source version i have to compile on my Mac).

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[mczak]

Definitely second this. It can't play *anything* (well maybe it can but I couldn't find something it likes - really). Won't even play divx movies!
However, I didn't compile it myself, just looked around and somebody provided suse 8.1 binaries (rpm didn't like it - but you know --nodeps always helps).
mczak

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter, anyway? The software works, and works pretty well. Arguing about the less important things is for people with too much of free time.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[aminorex]

Some MPlayer developers have complained about the distribution
of crippled versions of MPlayer by the Debian project. This is
a reasonable complaint, since it is the MPlayer developers who
get a lot of the resulting complaints. It seems likely that
MPlayer will not be distributed by Debian in the future, not
because they are prohibited by the MPlayer developers, although
certainly one would expect Debian to respect their wishes that
no crippled binaries should be distributed as a matter of
courtesy, but because MPlayer's licensing issues are sufficiently
complex and obscure that no real consensus admitting it in
Debian is likely to emerge.

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[arturogatti]

I'd say this goes beyond mere "complaining." :)

Re:MPlayer links to sites with binaries...

[Ben Hutchings]

The Debian project never has distributed mplayer. However, an individual Debian developer has built Debian packages of mplayer and made them available on his own site.

The downfall of debian

[Alan]

I used to be a total debian advocate until about 6 months ago, when I switched my desktop to a gentoo system. Debian is great, but their ethics get in the way of putting out a first class distro.

In gentoo you don't have to go off and find different sources for debian deemed "non-free" or "non compliant" packages, or go off and download things like the win32 codecs by hand because to *gasp* download them automagically would be a violation of blah blah charter blah blah.

To "win the desktop" linux has to give users the ability to easily get the programs and packages that they need and want to use. If granny has to figure out where to find the URL of the secret package such-and-such, she's not going to get it. If it's done for her, she'll be able to appreciate things.

Sorry to rant, but I've noticed more and more lately how debian's philosophy is getting in the way of me getting the programs I want to use. Yes, I know that I can add suchandsuch to my apt-sources, but why should I have to? Also, while as amusing as the legal flame wars about how paragraph 32 line 8 words 14-18 in the program license excludes it from being included in debian main are, they get old real soon.

I wouldn't have said anything, but under gentoo I type "emerge mplayer" and get the latest version, with all the patches and codecs. "emerge freetype" and I get freetype with the 'in the grey' hack to make things look better, etc etc.

Anyone else think that debian is getting a bit anal in these matters?

rant off....

Re:The downfall of debian

[chromatic]

I'm glad to see a group of people with a consistent ethical code -- especially when those ethics haven't compromised for the sake of pragmatism. (I'm even happier when it's an ethical code that complements mine.)

It seems kind of funny to suggest that Debian needs to compromise its principles to "win the desktop", when the goal of Debian has always been to spread free software, not to "win" anything.

Re:The downfall of debian

[jcw2112]

that's the beauty of multiple distros. if gentoo's politics make you happy and debian's don't, then your path is clear.
i happen to prefer the "clean" way that debian does things, so i will stick with it. if i ever change my mind, there are many others to choose from.

so i say: preach on debian!

Re:The downfall of debian

[Just Some Guy]

In gentoo you don't have to go off and find different sources for debian deemed "non-free" or "non compliant" packages...

You mean, the ones that the Debian installer asks if you want to add when you first configure the system? Are those the hard-to-find "different sources"?

To "win the desktop" linux has to give users the ability to easily get the programs and packages that they need and want to use.

Debian does a terrific job of providing the packages that they are legally and ethically allowed to provide.

Sorry to rant, but I've noticed more and more lately how debian's philosophy is getting in the way of me getting the programs I want to use.

If that's the case, then you shouldn't installed Debian in the first place. The Debian Free Software Guidelines are published and clear; if you don't agree with their philosophy, you're quite free to install another completely free professional-quality distribution.

On the other hand, I love Debian for the exact reason you do not: I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I am 100% in license compliance with every piece of software on my system. I'd almost welcome a BSA audit - it'd be fun to yell "IN YOUR FACE!!!" every time they get snippety.

Re:The downfall of debian

[fault0]

> Anyone else think that debian is getting a bit anal in these matters?

Yes.. I've always thought so. Like you, I was also a long-time Debian user, and I too switched from it to Gentoo. I know some people use Debian because it is the most "pure" distro, but I didn't. I used it because of apt. I used debian-unstable, and I noticed gradually that the wealth of new packages was going down the tubes. So I switched to Gentoo, which I am extremely happy with.

Re:The downfall of debian

[digital photo]

The problem, I think, is the fact that people don't really grasp that there are pragmatic differences of belief along with legal ones between the different distros of GNU/Linux.

With Debian, they are trying to create a distro which is GPL compatible through and through. And the thing is, if that means not including something in their distro, then they are not including that something. All to keep the legal issues of their distro as clean as possible.

This isn't saying that Debian is sacrificing quality, if anything, because of their approach, their distro probably works quite smoothly and efficiently.

Nothing prevents you from acquiring the packages you want to use. They are only enforcing their right to not include packages and/or softwares which violates their license and/or sense of what is right/wrong.

It's just a different way of seeing to how things work.

I've switched from Slackware to Redhat. From that to Mandrake. Then from that to Suse, which is what I'm currently using. Now, I'm thinking of switching to Debian.

Will the restrictions they have on the default distro hinder my experience on my Linux box? Probably not. If I need code, I certainly know how to go and perform the "download, configure, make and make install" dance. I'm no stranger to coding and software installations.

The point is, there will be people who value one facet of life greater than another. Some people could care less about licenses. That's fine. Just understand that there are those who do.

Not just licenses, but philosophy, ethics, morals, and laws.

Re:The downfall of debian

[sweetooth]

You really need to read the Debian social contract before ranting about what they are doing. The primary goals of the distribution are quite obviously differant from what you are looking for and you will probably be better served by another distribution.

If you want Linux to "win the desktop" then you should make that your priority and work in that direction, but please don't assume that is the goal of every Linux distribution under the sun. Debian is a quality distro that attempts to adhere to a fairly strict set of standards. I personally appreciate that they adhere to those standards because it's one less thing for me to worry about when using the distro.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Malc]

I disagree: Debian already puts out a first class distro.

Like you, I don't want to hear the constant Debian arguments. I choose to ignore them though and not read the mailing lists they're on. I don't need that level of involvement. I do accept that they are probably necessary and sign of people's commitment to the project. This is part of the foundations that makes Debian so stable and reliable.

IMHO, Debian is the best distro out there. But my needs are probably different to other people's.

Re:The downfall of debian

[tzanger]

"emerge freetype" and I get freetype with the 'in the grey' hack to make things look better, etc etc.

That's actually a pretty good pun...

Re:The downfall of debian

[HiThere]

The day may come when we will be quite grateful that one distribution stated totally clean. (OK, not totally. There's still that stuff in the kernel, and the HURD still isn't ready. If we're lucky, though, either it stuff in the kernel won't matter, or it won't matter until there's a workable alternative.)

P.S.: I'm not claiming that it's prettier. Merely that they have played things legally safer. And this may someday be important. Courts have made some quite peculiar decisions recently. Suppose, e.g., that MS bought SCO... well, OK. Those patents are peripheral. And most of the other questionable ones have expired. But nobody knows what someone will pop-up with tomorrow. If hyperlinks can be patented, what can't? (Well, the last I heard BT hasn't been able to collect. But if MS owned the patent...)

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Like granny is going to be able to install gentoo. Then she is going to want to wait for her programs to compile. If I could pick a distro that is worse for granny than Debian it is gentoo.

And some people respect ethics. If Debian is being anal in these matters, It's because their ethics mean something to them.

And as a final note, since you don't use Debian anymore, how about shutting the fuck up and go play with your gentoo.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Jason Earl]

Ethics...smethics. The best thing about Debian is that they take a good hard look at the legal aspects of each software package so that you don't have to. If something is in Debian main then you can be pretty sure that someone with a clue has taken a gander at the license, and that is a big deal.

Folks can pretend that technical issues are more important than legal issues, but that's just not true. The software packages that don't pay attention to the legal issues eventually get tripped up by them. For example, think of all of the pain and agony that KDE could have saved if they had been careful about the licensing issues right from the start.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Captain Rotundo]

I hat e to break it too you, but this does not signify to "downfall of Debian" it simply points out that you are not a target user of Debian. The whole point of the entire project is a free system. By them makign stands on otherwise useful software and not giving in one can see that the project is running as well as it should. I am not saying I want granny to run Debian and have to search for URLs etc, I'm saying that Debian is a project heavily rooted in the politics, and I for one am happy to see that there still are people who will sacrifice a little "usability" for thier values.

IANADD - (I am not a Debian Developer)

Re:The downfall of debian

[MBCook]

I too, used Debian for a long time; and I too now use Gentoo. But, the fact is that your missing the point. Debian is free. Debian is COMPLETELY FREE. AFIK, it's the only true FREE distro, in that they don't include anything that's not free.

Let's not forget that your free to choose whatever distro you like. Like I said above, I now use Gentoo for my desktop for a variety of reasons (all source, newer packages, faster due to optimisations, etc) but I use Debian on all my other boxes.

It's an unfair comparison, to put Gentoo and Debian together. Gentoo is like Mandrake (IMHO), it's a desktop distro. It's got great stuff that's pretty new, it's fast, etc.

Debian is, to me, a base distro. It's a rock. NOTHING gets into Debian unless it's been well tested. If you run Stable, you should NEVER have a single crash, it's that stable. The fact is, Debian's unstable branch is equivelent to most other distros out that, in my expirence. If you want a rock solid server, use Debian. If you want to create a great desktop distro, and want a great foundation to build on, use Debian.

Also don't forget that Debian is not just another distro, it's THE distro. Where would free software be without Debian? If you have some odd architecutre, what distro will you run? You can choose some little distro that no one has ever heard of. You could use Linux From Scratch. Or you could use Debian. Debian is on tons of different archs and it's identicle on all of them. Debian is largely responsible for for the porting of, and testing of, XFree on many of the more exotic platforms (IIRC).

Debian may be slow to get new packages, but Debian has a quality that just can't be matched. I may use Gentoo for my desktop system, but I use Debian for everything else. Why? For one thing, whether the machine is a Mac, a PC, or anything else, it looks just the same. I don't have to remember 30 diferent filesystem layouts from 35 diferent distros. I don't have to keep a cheat sheet of how to install packages on that computer (was it "rpm -Uvh", or "emerge", or "cast", or...). Debian may not be as good a desktop distro as Mandrake, Gentoo, Suse, or others. But the fact is that it's the best for just about everything else. Debian is the swiss-army knife of distros. Any platform, any task, anything; Debian can do it. It runs out of the box on 386s or on the newest P4.

In short, Debian is one of the best things to happen to free software, IMHO. Just because it no longer works for you doesn't mean that it now sucks! If I was a corporation deploying Linux on lots of desktops and I wanted something that wouldn't cause me any problems, I'd run Debian.

You can say that think kind of issue is what's keeping Debian off the desktop, and you might be right. You can say that it's the kind of thing that proves that some projects can just get too large to work well as OSS. But it's these kind of issues that make Debian so good. So please don't go saying "Debian will die because of this," when the fact is this is what makes Debian so strong.

And if you don't like the direction that Debian is going in, change it. The elections for the top positions on the Debian project is about to be held. Run for a position.

But I guess it's just easier to whine here on /. than to actually try to influence things the correct way.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm sure we're all relieved that when the BSA decides to do a sweep for GPL violations, Debian users will come out unscathed.

Re:The downfall of debian

[wass]

You mean, the ones that the Debian installer asks if you want to add when you first configure the system? Are those the hard-to-find "different sources"?

And don't forget that many of the prominent software packages that are either too new to go into unstable, or have other such issues preventing their official inclusion, can be found at apt-get.org.

For example, if you're interested in mplayer, apt-get tells you that you can add
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main
to your sources.list file, which allows easy download and install of mplayer (you even have your option of optimizations for 686, k7, and others) as well as W32 codecs, etc.

Re:The downfall of debian

[legLess]

Debian is great, but their ethics get in the way of putting out a first class distro.

Depends on what your goals are, doesn't it?

Anyone else think that debian is getting a bit anal in these matters?

"Getting?" Since when have Debian not been anal in this way? Their charter and policies are pretty clear, I think.

To "win the desktop" ... If granny has to figure out ...

This is all true, and all completely beside the point. There are few distributions more ill-suited for Granny than Debian. This has been true since Debian's inception, and will likely be true for quite some time to come. It's by design: Debian is for people who want a heavily-customizable, very stable, free, and Free OS. If you want "Granny-useful," pick another distro.

violation of blah blah charter blah blah ... legal flame wars about how paragraph 32 line 8 words 14-18 in the program license

No offense, and I'm sure you realize this, but the fact that these issues appear to you to be "blah blah" is another indication that Debian is not for you. That's fine - there are many other distros that do what you want.

Sorry to rant, but I've noticed more and more lately how debian's philosophy is getting in the way of me getting the programs I want to use.

This is a result of more and more people developing software for Linux, not Debian's changing policies. Yes, they're anal; yes, they're legalistic. However their goal is a lofty one - be the Galahad of Linux distros. If you don't share that goal, use another distro and God bless you. But don't flame them for standing firm by the principles they've used, publically, since the start.

Re:The downfall of debian

[gperciva]

> Debian is great, but their ethics get in the way of putting out a first class distro.

That sounds like a great reason to use Debian.

Would Debian be any greater if they _did_ compromise their ethics? *sigh* kids these days.

Re:The downfall of debian

[colinleroy]

I'd almost welcome a BSA audit - it'd be fun to yell "IN YOUR FACE!!!" every time they get snippety.
I'm not sure BSA audits are legal, BSA is a private company who has no right to even look at my screen, at least in france.

See this article (in french, sorry) for example.

Re:The downfall of debian

[eyez]

I used to be a total debian advocate until about 6 months ago, when I switched my desktop to a gentoo system. Debian is great, but their ethics get in the way of putting out a first class distro.

Not that gentoo doesn't have problems of a different nature in their packaging system- They patch things to hell. While you as the user may think this is happy and perfect, You have to realize what it does for the developers.

A lot of the patches in a gentoo system are ones that the program's developers haven't seen. On top of that, the distribution packager doesn't usually take credit for the bugs caused, so those bugs end up going to the developers, who haven't seen the code and likely don't even know that it's patched. This is a problem with /many/ linux distributions, and the freebsd ports system is notorious for it.

Debian's about the only distribution I know of that has a policy to try to get patches pushed into the upstream version. I /Really/ Applaud this.

Another problem that many distributions have in their packaging policies, is that they enable almost anything in the ./configure scripts, even those that are marked as expirimental or unstable.

I always wonder when distributions are going to "get it", and start asking the program developers what the best way to proceed for the program's users is.

Re:The downfall of debian

[jazman_777]

Ethics...smethics. The best thing about Debian is that they take a good hard look at the legal aspects of each software package so that you don't have to. If something is in Debian main then you can be pretty sure that someone with a clue has taken a gander at the license, and that is a big deal.

The OpenBSD folks do the same thing. It's a nice feeling to have a distro where they're serious about making sure no one else can dictate what can be done with a piece of the system--especially a critical piece. Take ipf, for example. They dumped Darren Reed's ipf in favor of a home-grown pf, all because of some licensing snakiness. And how many of us would figure that out?

Re:The downfall of debian

[Fnkmaster]

Great, and you think Linux is going to "win the desktop" by breaking laws and distributing legally-grey-area software all over the place? I hate to tell you, but that's not going to convince corporate backers. I think a big part of the value Debian provides in separating out Free and Non-Free is by clarifying that Debian is the core of a legally compliant Linux operating system. If I were a company looking to distribute a commercial desktop Linux distro, I'd consider using Debian as the starting point - great package system, and you know the license-legality of all the Free packages is going to be on the up-and-up.

Debian carries a lot of moral weight and positive connotations to people in the Linux and Free Software communities because of their social contract and quality software release process. They don't make the most user-friendly distro, but then again, neither does Gentoo. And the fact that Gentoo throws in lots of legally grey software is nice for the end user in the short term, but it'll guarantee no company wants to install it, and prevent anybody from basing other distributions on Gentoo (then again, who the hell would want to make a desktop distro for granny where you had to compile every package you want to download? That's the wrong solution to the packaging problem).

Re:The downfall of debian

[Enahs]

Agreed.

And as the MPlayer people point out, some of the same deps are perfectly all right in other Debian packages, while they're not in MPlayer.

Sounds like a personality conflict...

I'm ashamed to admit that I just replaced Gentoo on my main machine with, of all things, Red Hat 8. I needed something that I could rely on to just work, dammit. ;-D Having said that, I'm going to have to install software like XMMS and MPlayer from source. :-/

Re:The downfall of debian

[Ian Bicking]

I think it's imporant to remember that Debian's anal approach to licensing has been constructive, not just restrictive. I think that Qt is licensed under the GPL is largely thanks to Debian's analness -- not just complaining about KDE's license violation, but excluding them from the distribution until they got their act together. Now everyone benefits from a clearer licensing situation in KDE, including the KDE developers.

I'm sure many other vague licensing situations for smaller pieces of software have also been sorted out due to the diligence of debian-legal. Hopefully MPlayer will as well.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

There really is little point to using debian unless you are a free software zealot. Constant bikering and internal conflict get in the way of producing a solid distro. Sometimes important projects are given to kids who can't handle the responsibility while months elapse before they update their packages after a major release. Debian reminds me of a Star Trek convention... does anyone take them seriously?

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll dude - you got what, like 20 chomps? I applaud you!

Re:The downfall of debian

[Dehumanizer]

So, you'd rather have them break the law?

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

It simply can't be said better than that. Well done.

Re:The downfall of debian

[styrotech]

I agree, Debian and OpenBSD seem to be unique in the way that they care about the legality of what they are doing and how it matches their project goals.

They seem to put a high value on their 'customers' never running into legal issues, while other distros seem to care more about what they can get away with.

Re:The downfall of debian

[tongue]

The primary goals of the distribution are quite obviously differant from what you are looking for and you will probably be better served by another distribution.

correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't he say he switched to gentoo?

Re:The downfall of debian

[sweetooth]

Yes he did specifically say he switched to Gentoo. I was just trying to infer that based on the differances between the Debian ideology and his needs that he would probably be served better by another distribution. His statment simply states that this is true. I suppose it would have sounded better if I stated he was being served better by another distro because of the differances, but it's a little late now ;)

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are an idiot. And the moderators that got you to +5 are morons.

Does the word "liability" have a meaning for you? Do you know what does it mean to partake in illegal activities? Do you know the court meaning of "promoting illegal behaviour"?

People like you disgust me. You are scum. You make me wish I had never written a single line of code. You are just not worth it.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Alan]

Wow, what a response. I never realized that one badly worded and beer and BC pot influenced braino message would insight so much. I wasn't trolling, but I certainly wasn't coherant. And for the record, all but my desktop machine is debian, and regardless of what I rambled above, I do love it.

Of course, this being slashdot and all...

Bah.

Re:The downfall of debian

[conan_albrecht]

You'll love Debian if you switch. I went RH --> Mandrake --> Debian. I've never looked back. The stability of Debian and the ease of apt-get just can't be matched.

I was teaching a class the other day, and I realized that my computer didn't have a package that I needed (nmap), so I ran apt-get right in front of the students. Within 10 seconds I had nmap installed and ready to use. The students were in awe.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

What "issues"? Who could go after end users? Who would go after end users and what they would achieve except seriously bad PR? Each minute spent arguing about low-priority issues could be spent on coding.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Your idea of a "desktop" distro is one where you

• Manually Create your own filesystem?
• Set your own gcc compile flags?
• Manually edit the bootloader config file?
• Configure and compile your own kernel?

What do you use as your geeky, arcane play around distro?

Re:The downfall of debian

[kien]

Anyone else think that debian is getting a bit anal in these matters?

In a word, yes. But I can understand why they're anal...it costs a lot to get sued, even when you're "right" (and even that term is up for grabs these days).

You said it best yourself, Alan:

Also, while as amusing as the legal flame wars about how paragraph 32 line 8 words 14-18 in the program license excludes it from being included in debian main are, they get old real soon.

Last week, one of my cousins said to me "I want to go to college and learn to be a programmer!" I told him to go to law school first.

People often (mistakenly) characterize the GPL with the phrase "Information wants to be free". Phooey. The GPL simply codified what we're becoming increasingly aware of: Information is free whether you like it or not.

Fueds like this only give fuel to the people that oppose my efforts to migrate my company's software infrastructure to GNU/Linux solutions. All they have to do is bring up the legal morass that we might become involved in and the beancounters throw my suggestions out the window. It will be a shame if the counter-culture independent creativity that has fueled this revolution turns in upon itself.

--K.

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. People like debian
precisely _because_ (among other things) they are anal about such things.
Like the ideals of free software? Then debian is
the best representative of that. Like linux but
don't care so much about principles? Then still use
debian because it rocks. Debian misses software
you can't live without? Use gentoo or whatever
else, but don't bag volunteers for spending their
own time the way they want too, sticking up for
principles that they believe in (and producing
the best distro out there in the process).

Re:The downfall of debian

[arose]

It seems to me, that Mandrake does much the same...

Re:The downfall of debian

[Bert64]

Well, but once installed gentoo makes a brilliant desktop... I deployed it on 16 machines that are being used for web browsing, and i havent had a single problem.. its fast, stable as hell, and trivial to install new programs.. and has the latest tools appropriate to the use of the machines (kde, mozilla, phoenix, galeon)

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

freetype (2.1.2-10) unstable; urgency=low

* Turning back on the bytecode interpreter. Too tired to care now.
May turn it off again when Xft2 and fontconfig are in Debian.
* Removed libkpathsea-dev build-dependency. It was used for the the
FreeType 1 contributed tools, but those tools were not yet ported
to FreeType 2. Also removed the 'debian/\' file. Thanks to
P. Doblerman for the bug report. (Closes: Bug#166064)

-- Anthony Fok Thu, 24 Oct 2002 10:17:18 +0800
And it hasn't turned off since.

Re:The downfall of debian

[OzJimbob]

True that - I believe the same thing about Lycoris Desktop/LX. I don't have it installed now, mainly because I like having a distro I can muddle around with and compile new software on, and I couldn't be bothered downloading the additional development ISO for Lycoris. However, when I tried it, I was so impressed.

It just worked.

Mozilla came with plugins installed for Java, Flash, even Adobe Acrobat. Compare and contrast with Mandrake (and most other Linux distros) where Mozilla comes with NO PLUGINS WHAT SO EVER and is therefore about as useful as a bicycle to a fish for any new Linux convert. I have to admit Lycoris's blatent rip of off WinXP was a bit off putting, but it does all look very unified.

So Lycoris decided to step away from holier-than-thou GPL obsessiveness and include some binaries. The result? The first Linux distro I've ever seen that I would honestly install for my aunty, and know that she could use it for every task she would need to. Bye bye Windows for ever. Isn't that the ultimate aim?

Re:The downfall of debian

[Anonymous Coward]

At the moment, granny is using MS Windows, which doesn't even have an automated package management system. There you have to not only find the secret url of the program you want, but also save it to disk, and run the setup prog from there.

I'm sure Debian could improve in that department, but apt-get is still much better than any of the alternatives, even if the rest of Debian isn't.

frightening

[Boromir son of Faram]

It's scary to see such strife within the Open Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we all, a focus on our true enemies, those who persist in making and publishing proprietary and other non-Free software.

The beauty of it is that we have the option of choosing our battles. Mplayer is a great program, and has made many contributions to the community and innovations to media applications in general (QuickTime, for example). Why go after them? Instead, we should be going after the real offenders, the companies that violate the GPL to line their own profit margins.

Do not forget that mplayer is a powerful tool in our battle against those who would destroy us.

Re:frightening

[Flamerule]

Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith

Jesus dude, have you even read the books? Boromir and Faramir are brothers; their father is Denethor, Steward of Gondor.

(I'd link to The Encyclopedia of Arda, but their servers have been bitchslapped since The Two Towers came out, and their site is slower than hell.)

Re:frightening

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'd much prefer, as would we all, a focus on our true enemies, those who persist in making and publishing proprietary and other non-Free software."

Why do you consider software developers earning a wage your enemy?

Re:frightening

[Just Some Guy]

I'd much prefer, as would we all, a focus on our true enemies, those who persist in making and publishing proprietary and other non-Free software.

Who is this nebulous "we" that thinks of proprietary software houses as "enemies"? Most software in the real world is non-Free, simply because most companies have no interest in releasing their widget-manufacturing software to the world, primarily because noone has ever asked for it. I've written custom software to track candle inventory; I don't recall seeing "candlewarehousing" as a category in the FreeBSD ports system.

Mplayer is a great program, and has made many contributions to the community and innovations to media applications in general (QuickTime, for example).

I wasn't aware that Mplayer is an Apple product.

Do not forget that mplayer is a powerful tool in our battle against those who would destroy us.

Adjust your tinfoil hat, or grow up.

Re:frightening

[Xzzy]

> It's scary to see such strife within the Open
> Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we
> all, a focus on our true enemies,

The world isn't black and white, it has shades of every color. Arguments like this, the self policing of the open source community, will in the long run make open source stronger.

I wouldn't have it any other way, sometimes the best way to get a problem solved is to bruise some egos.

Re:frightening

[SubtleNuance]

Do not forget that mplayer is a powerful tool in our battle against those who would destroy us.

PREACH IT MY BROTHER!

Re:frightening

[Junta]

Ugh.... I'll admit that mplayer has done a lot, but do not give them credit for QuickTime. Apple invented it. The container format is well known and published, and linux supported before mplayer even existed (xanim could parse .mov). Now if you are talking about the source-available decoder for Sorenson, Xine had that first. With that, about 80-85% of the .movs out there became playable under linux (not just x86 linux). I will admit that mplayer seems to be the first to get the QuickTime binary codecs (audio of the 15-20% .movs out there) to work under x86 linux.

They were not the first to use binary video codecs from windows (as some have claimed in this discussion), that honor belongs to either avifile or xmps (I can't remember which or if they were interdependent, but avifile remains alive..).

MPlayer and xine have been pretty competitive in terms of codec support, but only through cooperation. MPlayer brings a lot of good and unique things to the table in terms of an application suite (mplayer and mencoder), but they did not invent everything they use. They *have* done a kick ass job of bringing everything together to have the most capable player (what else can play so many formats to so many output devices?). Technologically speaking, the thing lacking is a clean plugin architecture, and a nice thing would be a clean API capability (ala xine-lib). Legally speaking, I'm quite sure any number of companies (MS, Apple, Sorenson, Realnetworks, others) could give the big smack down to mplayer if they wanted. Then again, they could also smack down avifile, xine, Gentoo, and any number of other projects that do not occur to me right now. They are wishy-washy on the GPL I think, but it seems to be more a matter of support than anything. They will make a best-effort attempt at support, unless you got a binary precompiled, and the GPL states that no support is required at all.

Re:frightening

[Anonymous Coward]

Mplayer is based in Hungary, where no laws exist that could be used against them.

Re:frightening

[Anonymous Coward]

We've never said that we invented all of them.
It's enough to look at AUTHORS, it's allw ritten down weel.

Btw, your numbers about xine's qt support are far from reality: xine had only SVQ1 video decoder (they rev.eng'ed). But 90% of teh mov files with SVQ1 has QDMC/WDM2/Qclp audio which has no opensource decoder. So xine actually could play 10% of the SVQ1 files (20% of total movs nowdays).

The rest needed SVQ3 and Q* audio support, we made. Along with the whole RealVideo reverse engineering you forgot to mention.

The Win32 DLLs support (except quicktime) was developed by the avifile project. XMPS just took that code just like we or xine or others.
But note taht we're working togetwer with Zdnek kabelac (avifile maintainer) to improve teh DLL loader and we've added support for many DLLs already.

A'rpi/MPlayer team

ps: we do NOT prohibit binary distribution! otherwise why would we offer RPM binaries for example??? We don't _like_ binary distribution, it's a BIG difference!!!

Re:frightening

[JohnFluxx]

Agreed.

The first thing they teach you if you ever do a business course is that the first sign of trouble in a company is when everyone starts agreeing with each other. Same for coding projects, etc.

Re:frightening

[GavK]

Not to mention that his father was the Steward of Gondor "Gondor has no king" (Even watching the 1st movie tells you that...

Maybe he'll get it after Return of the King...

Re:frightening

[justins]

Who is this nebulous "we" that thinks of proprietary software houses as "enemies"?

Hey dummy! Fight the power! Down with those bad guys who... um... write the codecs which... MPlayer "borrows."

Well, look at their original reasons.

[hklingon]

Honestly. I've been an mPlayer user for ages. In the past, the mPlayer people did not like for you to distribute binaries because it was difficult, if not impossible, to build binaries that would perform well on most x86 arcitectures. (So the story goes...) and they tried it (redhat, I think, was first) and got tons of flames and support requests on the mailing list beacuse the binary packages were flaky. It is part their code, lack of a good install script, and some other stuff, but they had a valid point. Especially when you link to external windows libraries and things like that-- it seemd to get real flaky if you had precompiled binaries (at least on redhat) though I'm told some crafty package maintaners have got it down-pat pretty good now. In the early days the mplayer authors didn't want to get a rep that their software was bad or flaky. The software was great... yeah the installer could have used some work, but...

So befoe you flame them about a GPL, try to understand their (at least historical) reasons for asking this.

Re:Well, look at their original reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. They're not asking, they're telling. If they've released it under the GPL, the stipulation of the license states that you're allowed to redistribute binaries. They're telling you that's not the case.

The real problem is that he's an ego-Nazi. He hates any ports of mPlayer, he hates anyone who distributes binaries.

Re:Well, look at their original reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the case. They used to deny distributing binaries because of licencing issues.

As soon as these licencing issues were sorted out, the developers allowed distribution of binaries.

Re:Well, look at their original reasons.

[Bill Currie]

Actually, due to those licencing issues, the MPlayer developers had no right to distribute anything except for the code they wrote themselves (and that would be pretty useless:).

Re:Well, look at their original reasons.

[hklingon]

If I had installed redhat binaries (cuz I'm lazy like that... and some of my computers are very slow) of mplayer way back when, I would not be using mplayer. At all. Its a kind of rock and hard place situation, really. I can relate to both sides of the issue-- just trying to prevent a GPL jihad from starting. When I went to look for binaries, I found on their website something like "please do not distribute binaries. This is because compilers, libraries, etc vary from system to system and we're doing naughty, naughty things in order for you to be able to execute windows libraries with this code. it is quite beta right now, and we had loads of problems when binary versions of mplayer were popping up here and there. thanks."

It is unfortunate, the wording in their license, but perhaps you should benchmark and profile i386 binaries vs. -O2 -march (whatever)binaries. It really makes a world of difference...

preview

[Joe the Lesser]

Flame War: The Return of Mplayer
This movie will star Alan Alda and Bruce Willis as top lawyers. The role of 'mplayer' will be played by Chris Kattan.

Re:preview

[DJ Rubbie]

I sense negative karma destroying the devian-devel mailing list...

You really need to build it....

[hughk]

To be honest, packaging MPlayer as binary is far from easy because it has so many dependancies, especially on some software that is changing. It really is easier to install from source and to run configure and build on your own system to avoid a dependency hell which brings back memories of another well known company.

Once built and optimised for your architecture it does run well, and on my poor little notebook (500MHz PIII), it beats the pants off media player under Win 2K.

Having to build from source is inconvenient, but unless MPlayer is linked statically, I reaaly thing that this is better than installing a prepacked binary.

Re:You really need to build it....

[Isaac-Lew]

Just build mplayer statically - should solve dep problems (it would use more memory, but not significantly I would think).

Re:You really need to build it....

[Cid Highwind]

Erm... let's see here

[will@chi will] $ ldd `which gmplayer`
libpostproc.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpostproc.so.0 (0x40014000)
libdvdnav.so.1 => /usr/lib/libdvdnav.so.1 (0x4001d000)
libdvdread.so.2 => /usr/lib/libdvdread.so.2 (0x40032000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x40052000)
libvorbis.so.0 => /usr/lib/libvorbis.so.0 (0x400a2000)
libogg.so.0 => /usr/lib/libogg.so.0 (0x400c2000)
libdv.so.2 => /usr/lib/libdv.so.2 (0x400c6000)
libdivxdecore.so.0 => /usr/lib/libdivxdecore.so.0 (0x400f0000)
libpng.so.3 => /usr/lib/libpng.so.3 (0x4013c000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x40168000)
libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0x40176000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x40197000)
libcdda_interface.so.0 => /usr/lib/libcdda_interface.so.0 (0x401e9000)
libcdda_paranoia.so.0 => /usr/lib/libcdda_paranoia.so.0 (0x401fc000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x40205000)
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x4021a000)
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x40473000)
libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0x404e1000)
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0x404fa000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4050f000)
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 (0x40532000)
libpangox-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangox-1.0.so.0 (0x40554000)
libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x40561000)
libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x40595000)
libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x405c8000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x405cd000)
libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x405d0000)
libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x4063a000)
libXxf86dga.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXxf86dga.so.1 (0x40687000)
libXv.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.so.1 (0x4068d000)
libXxf86vm.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXxf86vm.so.1 (0x40692000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x40698000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x406a8000)
libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 (0x40788000)
libvgagl.so.1 => /usr/lib/libvgagl.so.1 (0x407fa000)
libvga.so.1 => /usr/lib/libvga.so.1 (0x40809000)
libgif.so.4 => /usr/lib/libgif.so.4 (0x40876000)
libesd.so.0 => /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 (0x4087f000)
libaudiofile.so.0 => /usr/lib/libaudiofile.so.0 (0x40887000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x408ab000)
libpopt.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpopt.so.0 (0x409d9000)
libXft.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x409e0000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x409f4000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x409fc000)
libGLcore.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1 (0x40a25000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x40eb7000)

This is for MPlayer 0.90rc3-3.2.1. Note that this listing doesn't count the 74 Windows .dlls and directshow filters that MPlayer can also load. You could probably trim off some of that by building it without the GUI, and without some of the more useless video codecs, but it would still require a lot of libraries. Still, I don't even want to *think* about statically linking all of that!

(insert some random less-compressable stuff here to defeat the lameness filter. All this thing does is piss off legitimate users. The crapflooders have all gone home, you can turn off the gzip-nazi filter now, Taco!!)

Re:You really need to build it....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you compile all the GNOME shit inside it ? It's not required and would remove 2/3 of the libs shown by you.

Re:You really need to build it....

[Sabalon]

While as you said, this may be an extreme example, I have always hated this, and I know a couple people that have been turned off from Linux/Unix/OSS because of this.

Wanna install application X, well the developer decided to use library y and z, plus created their own library which is now a seperate project with it's own odd dependincies, each with their own as well.

And by the way, if you are lucky you'll find the magic combo of library y, library z, and libray z+ which all work together with common library a version 5.2 - which you can't upgrade or app W won't work.

It makes DLL hell look simple - then again, the main difference is that 99% of the time if someone like the debian team or RedHat has done this dirty work, you as the end user just install the binary package and it all works...dll hell affects end users but shouldn't.

Myself - I've learned to slug through the above - my beef is trying to get some obscure library compiling on HP-UX - you can tell what developers have seen more than Linux and who hasn't :)

Re:You really need to build it....

[debrain]

In debian (and perhaps gentoo), it is easy to get mplayer installed,

# acquire
wget ftp://...mplayer-link.../MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2

# decompress source
tar jxvf MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2

# acquire useful directory state :)
cd MPlayer-0.90rc3

# [X] build a debian package
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage

# fix various complaints about packages missing
# (best to do this in another window; must be root
# or apt-get set{u,g}id root, which is pure evil)
apt-get install fakeroot libpng12-0-dev libgtk1.2-dev ...

# do [X] again
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage

# ... then
cd ..
dpkg -i mplayer_0.90rc3-0_i386.deb

Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess. :)

Cheers
Brian
- Just when Ih think I'm out .... they pulla me back in!

Re:You really need to build it....

[Anonymous Coward]

Once built and optimised for your architecture it does run well, and on my poor little notebook (500MHz PIII), it beats the pants off media player under Win 2K.

I agree. On my celeron 366 I can play fullscreen 640x480 with mplayer. With even mplayer2 (the old windows media player 6.4 or whatever) it still shits out in 640x480.

Good show mplayer guys. I know it sounds like the codec should be the whole thing but I guess the player makes the difference in my experience.

Re:You really need to build it....

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I use gnome, and there was no good reason not to let mplayer link to those libraries.

Re:You really need to build it....

[anonymous cupboard]

At least Linux has versioning on its shareable libraries, but I agree that chasing versions across subprojects is far from simple.

I've been playing with some much simpler stuff which was working somewhere between Gnome 1.4 and 2 and I still can't get it right so that it will cleanly build a binary rpm.

I use rpm (far from perfect) but with apt4rpm - normally it is great at fetching prerequisites. If it finds something that clashes with what you have, it tells you. MPlayer's bits created a few problems there, I can tell you, but oh, so much better than WinDLL hell.

Re:You really need to build it....

[G�tz]

The Mandrake cooker source package has a switch to enable static linking of the binary. You just need to type this:

rpmbuild --rebuild --with fullstatic --with plf mplayer-0.90-0.rc3.2mdk.src.rpm

on a reasonable new Mandrake system and you'll get a static binary.

AFAIK MPlayer's GUI doesn't use GTK+2 but GTK+1.2, so it's really useless to link to libglib-2.0.so.0 & Co.

Re:You really need to build it....

[hughk]

I just fetched everything I could as source packackages (I use apt under rpm) like someone else here mentioned. I rebuilt to get the 686 binaries and installed those.

As for MPlayer, I ran ./configure, make and make install and it went in very easily. Most things do (of course they tend to end up in /usr/local unless specified otherwise, but thats ok with me). To be honest, I think compilation from source wouldn't be such a problem if imessages that were simply informative could be filtered. Failure messages could just be turned into something more intelligable like 'you must install package x first'. This is the main benefit of package managers, that they at least give reasonable dependancy messages.

Re:You really need to build it....

[Scarblac]

In debian (and perhaps gentoo), it is easy to get mplayer installed,

Just for completeness, here's the Gentoo version :-)

emerge mplayer # Downloads and compiles everything and their dependencies

But of course, if Gentoo didn't already have it then you'd have to write a .ebuild file, and that's currently still over my head. The ebuild is basically a script that defines where to download packages, what the dependencies are, how it has to be compiled and installed. Once someone's made that, the rest is trivial.

Re:You really need to build it....

[Sabalon]

The problem is when you need version x and y of some development libraries. Sure--there is versioning on the sharable libraries, but unless you start creating REALLY ugly directories, there is only one /usr/include/ldap.h or something, and if there are API differences...well, like I said-it gets ugly.

Yup...still better than windows

Re:You really need to build it....

[dvdeug]

Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess. :)

It may be easy, for some sense of that word, but it's tedious and annoying. I have about thousand packages installed on my system via dselect and apt-get; if I had to go through that for every one, I'd be there for months, and have hordes of devel packages installed that I otherwise wouldn't need. Windows users have to chase all over the net to get all their programs and upgrade anything; part of the reason I use Debian is because it's all right there in dselect, making it trivial to upgrade, remove and install.

Solution:

[dzym]

Provide source for mplayer, such as a tarball .orig and then a patch, in Debian.

You know, like how they handled UW PINE.

Re:Solution:

[fault0]

They wouldn't even have to include a patch, because mplayer is GPL minus the binary thing. They should handle it like they handle kernel sources.

I can see the point, but...

[kwoo]

I can see the point of requesting distribution through source only -- I personally find binary distributions have more problems unless they are statically linked. Especially for MPlayer, which uses a whole thwack of libraries.

The better solution would be to allow binary distribution (and even distribute binaries from the MPlayer website), but make it known that any complaints about the binary distributions will be met with a request to build from source instead.

I agree that violating section six of the GPL isn't a good thing, but I also think it's one reason why the GPL may not be the best fit for all software. (Before you flame me into the ground, I know MPlayer uses GPLed libs, so has to be GPLed -- I'm just saying...)

ditto (n/t)

[raejin_hardonne]

n/t

Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[glenstar]

Think of different binaries for the possible combinations of MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2, 3Dnow, 3Dnow2. and then C code compiled for i386, i586, i686, k6 etc. and then think of non-x86 archs. and then debian can introduce the one-program-one-cd concept.

That is from one of the mesages in the thread.

I would think that any rational person would be able to see the logic in this. However, apparently there are those that cannot. Amazing.

You see... the GPL throws the source at people who don't give a flying fuck about it (in the case of most end-users), and then followers of the GPL get their proverbial panties in a bunch when someone doesn't distribute the *binaries*. I don't get it.

Actually, more honestly, I don't really care. It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public. That is too bad, but until people realize that software is, well, software, and not some political instrument to stake your life on, these things will continue to occur.

Re:Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[stor]

> followers of the GPL get their proverbial panties in a bunch when someone doesn't distribute the *binaries*. I don't get it.

It's about following the GPL, which the MPlayer authors are not doing. You can't pick and choose what bits of the GPL you want to follow and then say that your software is GPL. What they're doing makes the licence meaningless.

I'm on the Debian developers side here even though I don't use Debian: I'm glad that there are people that actually care about doing the right thing rather that pretend there isn't a problem.

Xine doesn't need to be recompiled, neither does gstreamer or any other unix-based media player I've come across.

There's something wrong when a media player app forces you to recompile it depending on the processor. Why are these things compile-time options rather than runtime?

>Actually, more honestly, I don't really care. It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public.

Following a licence explicitly is The Right Thing. It's not Zealous at all.

Cheers
Stor

Re:Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[kevin lyda]

you're a moron.

the complaint is not that binaries are not distributed. the problem is the the mplayer developers have licensed their code under the gpl AND said that people are NOT ALLOWED to distribute binaries. the gpl does not allow that kind of restriction.

what's the point of distributing your code under a license if you're going to ignore it. when i write code i write what i mean, otherwise it doesn't work right. shouldn't the same logic apply to a license?

Re:Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Go and read the thread. Currently mplayer doesn't have to be recompile for a different CPU; it now has runtime CPU detection. This subthread started with someone (not a mplayer developer) suggesting that mplayer could be optimized for every CPU just by packing it for every CPU out there. Arpi (mplayer developer) disagreed.

Also, the developers do allow binary distribution. If you read the thread you would know this.

Quoting:
> > That doesn't prevent the binaries from working, using several packages
> > with different cpu optimisations. Many packages in Debian already work
> > this way.
> We call that method "hack".
And it's a big waste of space. Think of different binaries for the possible
combinations of MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2, 3Dnow, 3Dnow2. and then C code
compiled for i386, i586, i686, k6 etc. and then think of non-x86 archs.
and then debian can introduce the one-program-one-cd concept.

Re:Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

When mplayer had licencing issues, the developers didn't allow binary distribution because of legal troubles. That was ages ago.

Currently, they allow binary distribution.

looks like a messy "debate"

[bafu]

I have yet to read through all of the discussion that was linked to, but it is very heavy slogging so far... a surprising amount of seemingly-tangental name-calling and finger-pointing.

In the end, it's up to Debian what gets in. I've been displeased with their fervor from time-to-time over the years, but never enough to want to ditch the distro. I found it amusing that the mplayer link said they were trying to find out "why does debian-legal think they know what is GPL and what is not better than MPlayer and XAnim authors." The real question may be why MPlayer and XAnim authors think they get to decide what Debian is comfortable with...

My Debian machines will still have mplayer on it regardless of what Debian decides to include in their distro, but the fact remains that what goes into a Debian distro is entirely up to the Debian folks. Poking at them on the list isn't going to (and shouldn't) change that...

Re:looks like a messy "debate"

[Ogion]

My Debian machines will still have mplayer on it regardless of what Debian decides to include in their distro, but the fact remains that what goes into a Debian distro is entirely up to the Debian folks. Poking at them on the list isn't going to (and shouldn't) change that... Sure, but this messy flamewar might make some people in debian's legal team have another look at mplayer and the patent issue(what this is all about, not the binary distribution...), and start a useful discussion, which has already started at the time i write this, btw. The beginning of a real disussion is imho about there: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-l egal-200301/msg00153.html So what do we have now? A gory stupid flamewar that was the ignition to something which might end in the inclusion of mplayer in debian. Of course it might as well just not get included, but who knows?

Re:looks like a messy "debate"

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, seems like i forgot to add a newline after the quote.

We need Debian

[Dave W]

I have made my way through some of the thread.

This discussion again shows to me how valuable the legal team on Debian are. We do not want free software to end up having legal problems due to ignoring licenses. Unfortunately the checking is hard and complicated work so it is fortunate that we can rely on the Debian team.

Just look at the current SCO issues and be grateful for all Debian do to avoid problems like this.

Dave

Re:We need Debian

[Dave W]

The SCO problem is of course different, I for one think it is likely to be bogus depending as it does on seemingly unlikely assumptions about both Minix and Linux in the early days.

I am not sure why you think that obvious legal issues over a video player are less important that obscure patent issues on the kernel.

All licenses are there to be checked and kept. The mPlayer issue is relatively straightforward case of library foo uses license x, application bar uses foo, therefore does it keep to the license of foo.

Dave

Get a lawyer suing for mplayer license violation..

[Anonymous Coward]

And after it, imagine an openmosix cluster of that!

Our solution

[Amsterdam Vallon]

I work in the classroom support field of a major private high school in the US.

We have since stopped using Debian since back at the beginning of the school year (September 2002). Between useless email fights like this one, to other arguments that were show-stopping and delayed new releases, I grew fed up.

I was glad to turn our school's IT system nearly 100% to Linux, but I was almost as glad to switch everything to a package-based, Gentoo Linux flavor.

The OS of Linux is great, but as for the extra flamebait cruft you see on the Debian list, that I can do without.

Re:Our solution

[salimma]

Debian can indeed be very political. I still don't understand their problem with the GNOME/Bitstream font licensing agreement, for one.

It's quite sad, really, watching innovation dies within Debian to be replaced by excessive political correctness. Debian used to lead in packaging (apt+deb) but now apt has been ported to RPM (see Conectiva and FreshRPMS), Mandrake has uRPMi, and the Fink project has co-opted apt/deb for binary distribution but added their parallel build-from-source-with-dependency system.

I have packaged quite a few RPMs in the past, mostly due to the lack of compatible RPMs after RH8 came out - but the horrible mess that is debian build scripts put me off. There are even some alternative packaging scripts for Debian, surely a sign of problems, but they never really take off.

Here's my wishlist as an ex-Debian, soon-to-be Fink user (for the second time, my first OS X experience was held back by the lack of vector instructions in G3):
- Peace among developers
- Debian Desktop to succeed in making Debian more customer-friendly
- Faster release cycles (I thought their new testing system was meant to do that)
- Compile from source a'la Fink

Peace,

Re:Our solution

[Malc]

How many times do we have to reiterate this? It's not apt+debs that makes Debian package management so much more superior to other distributions. It's the care and effort and attention to detail that goes in to creating the packages and ensuring they work properly in the first place. Debian distributions are better tested and maintained than those from others.

Re:Our solution

[salimma]

Sorry, but from personal experience that does not always happen: witness the fact that Debian's gnome-pilot somehow was compiled without USB support and nobody noticed for months, and the developer never replied to my bug report.

In the end it was fixed after 5 months. Debian packages might be of high quality but their handling of bug reports sometimes.. fall short.

If Mandrake is too adventurous in packaging, Debian is the opposite...

totally missed point

[DrSkwid]

The aim of Debian might not be to enpower granny to send email but to provide a totally unencumbered OS.

Which is why it seems improper to insult them as "anal" when they are merely following the letter of their mandate.

Would you call Debian "anal" for say, refusing to distribute car tyres with every download? Of course not because car tyres are not what they do. The same is true for free/non-free. Software is either one or the other for some chosen definition and to blur the lines makes no sense.

Re:totally missed point

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is a car tyre, you motherfather chinese dentist?!?!

The main gist....

[catch23]

It seems like this thread explains lots of the issues regarding mplayer and it's inclusion in debian:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003 /debian-devel-200301/msg01772.html

The message basically outlines this:

xineplug_decode_ff.so 829032 - this is libavcodec, the MPEG4/DivX decoder
Did you pay the royalty to the MPEG Group?
They can come any time...

xineplug_decode_faad.so 164048 - this is the FAAD audio decoder, which is
just as illegal as libavcodec

Vidix - unusable ballast without libdha, which is
not packaged

nvidia_vid.so - part of Vidix.. Instead it is a
placeholder :) Just contains
printf("TODO") :))
Nice to know xine was packaged by people
who knew what they were doing :)))))))

xineplug_decode_w32dll.so - code (from Wine) to load win32 DLLs
It's total legal isn't it..?

ASF demuxer - Microsoft already forced a GPL project
to remove it (VirtualDub)
I hope Debian is also ready to face this :)

xineplug_decode_gsm610.so - xine's gsm610 is GPL, MPlayer's is not? :)
Nice.
WE say it's GPL.
Its original author says it's GPL.
Debian-legal says we are all wrong?? :))
Make me laugh.

Re:The main gist....

[Anonymous Coward]

As I posted on devel-legal about, the inclusion of Xine over MPlayer seemed totally personal.

You, in fact, pasted MPlayer's response as to why Xine should be left out if they leave out MPlayer.

All those files are Xine packages.

Thank you for proving my point.

They are not prohibiting binary distribution now. They did so in the past, but now they are not. The article should have said that the issue was about the FORMER legality of MPlayer, mostly because they broke some licenses earlier on so the could get a shipping player. I would have agreed with Debian then, but now that it is 100% GPL and allows binary distribution, this whole article is moot. Even if they said now that you can't build binary distributions, according to the licensing you could anyways. In the US, you can't enforce an "illegal" contract or agreement. The whole issue is moot and dead. That's why debian-legal has no clue what they are talking about, and it's why SourceMage GNU/Linux (I was former Video section maintainer), allows MPlayer into our grimoire. It's a no-brainer, really.

Seth Woolley

Re:The main gist....

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI this list consists of possible legal problems in Xine. The mplayer developer made this list to show that while debian-legal complains about parts of mplayer, debian already contains them (via xine).

Re:The main gist....

[catch23]

Yes. But discussing Xine may help solve the Mplayer problems. See how Arpi states it in this thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003 /debian-devel-200301/msg01840.html

Here's an excerpt:

The problems are the same, and xine is a live, existing example while
we're only "dreaming" about the mplayer case.
So, if we discuss XIne case, we'll get the answer to mplayer problems too.
But I agree, it's boring to discuss xine, let's talk about mplayer then.
We don't want that an unusable crppled-down version of mpleyer be included
in debian. Take it as-is or don't take it.
We have no problems with source distrubition, nor with binary distribution
if done well.

Re:The main gist....

[Xtifr]

FYI this list consists of possible legal problems in Xine.

Then the fellow should file a bug report against Xine. If his complaint is valid, then I have no doubt that Xine will be fixed or removed.

Saying, "you made a mistake here, so you should just go ahead and make another mistake" is silly. The KDE developers tried this strategy (back when KDE had license problems), and they successfully managed to get several programs based on a gui toolkit called libForms removed from Debian. Of course, that wasn't actualy what they were trying to do. What they really wanted was for Debian to say, "ok, we allowed those GPL'd libForms-based programs in, so we'll allow your GPL'd qt-based programs in too." But that's not how people with integrity act.

Re:The main gist....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Saying, "you made a mistake here, so you should just go ahead and make another mistake" is silly.

To me, it seems strange to question mplayer about libavcodec while Xine already includes libavcodec. I would assume glibc isn't discussed on debian-legal every time a deb is made?

> But that's not how people with integrity act.

Why this troll? The mplayer developers might be more direct that most people are used to, but this doesn't mean you should threat them with hostility (I meant a different word, but I can't find the right word). I agree that such a tactic is wrong, but I don't think the developer(s) were trying to do that.

Why question the use of a changelog for libmpeg2, when cvs contains the changelog, that changelog can be supplied to anyone who's asking for it and the libmpeg2 author agrees with it?

Re:The main gist....

[Ninja Programmer]

• xineplug_decode_w32dll.so - code (from Wine) to load win32 DLLs
  It's total legal isn't it..?
  

The win32 PE format (the underlying format for EXEs and DLLs in Windows) is a well described public format. You can even download a loader for it from my home page:

http://www.pobox.com/~qed/pe.zip

Re:The main gist....

[Xtifr]

To me, it seems strange to question mplayer about libavcodec while Xine already includes libavcodec.

Strange or not, it happened. People are welcome to question any of the licenses (or license combos) whenever they want. If we discover that we've made a mistake, we'll take steps to correct that mistake.

I would assume glibc isn't discussed on debian-legal every time a deb is made?

Every time? No, but if someone has an issue with the licensing of something, they're welcome to raise it at any time. A better example would be openssl, which is licensed with BSD+advertising-clause, which makes it incompatible with the GPL. Nobody noticed this at first, but once someone did notice it, we took steps to fix the problem, even removing SSL support from some programs.

> But that's not how people with integrity act.

Why this troll? The mplayer developers might be more direct that most people are used to, but this doesn't mean you should threat them with hostility

No, no, not talking about the mplayer folks at all. I have no problems with their complaints; that's fine, they're welcome to complain. And heck, even if the mplayer folks have been playing fast-and-loose with licenses, I wouldn't call that a lack of integrity. They're programmers, and programmers are more interested in technical matters than legal ones. As far as I'm concerned the integrity of the mplayer folks is just fine, they're doing what they want on the terms they want to do it on.

What I was saying is that if the mplayer folks expect Debian to say, "whoops, we accidentally broke our own rules, so I guess we can just ignore those rules now", then they're going to be disappointed. That would show a lack of integrity on Debian's part.

Why question the use of a changelog for libmpeg2

Now there I have to agree with you, I think that argument is ridiculous, and I hope it dies the horrible death it so richly deserves.

Re:The main gist....

[Anonymous Coward]

>Strange or not, it happened. People are welcome to question any of the licenses (or license combos) whenever they want. If we discover that we've made a mistake, we'll take steps to correct that mistake.

I agree with this.
When I started reading the thread, the first thing that was discussed was the libmpeg2 and mplayers past. After that, I assumed because libavcodec was used by Xine, questioning libavcodec was nothing but whining. Now I now Debian is just thorough. :)

> What I was saying is that if the mplayer folks expect Debian to say, "whoops, we accidentally broke our own rules, so I guess we can just ignore those rules now", then they're going to be disappointed. That would show a lack of integrity on Debian's part.

Ok, I misunderstood you.

I like Debian for what they stand for (although I don't use it), it's just sad that complying with all the legal issues means that you can't watch your ac3 dvd (and the downloaded divx/ogm ;) ).

Re:The main gist....

[dondelelcaro]

Now there I have to agree with you, I think that argument is ridiculous, and I hope it dies the horrible death it so richly deserves.

The libmpeg2 point was brought up simply because it was a case where mplayer developers hadn't followed the GPL in modifying libmpeg2 from mpeg2dec. I don't have time to go through every single stich of code in Mplayer, much of which doesn't have any copyright or authorship statement to determine which code in mplayer can be legally distributed by Debian, and which code cannot. People have already found code in mplayer that was not licensed correctly and prevented Debian from not only distributing the binary, but from distributing the source as well.

It's purpose was to serve primarily as an example of the sorts of licensing issues with mplayer that have been found in the past, and apparently still exist in the codebase. The issue is rediculously trivial to fix. A simple:

This file originated from mpeg2dec [url].
It was modified by foo for use in mplayer on date.
Changes to this file include:
* foo
* baz
A changelog is available at cvs.foo.bar.

in each file from mpeg2dec [and other GPL'ed libraries] modified by the mplayer team would solve this rather pathetic problem with section 2c of the GPL. I have no doubt that there are projects out there that violate section 2c of the GPL, but when it's brought to the project's attention, they tend to fix the problem.

Re:The main gist....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why question the use of a changelog for libmpeg2, when cvs contains the changelog

The GPL requires that the changelog is included with the source.

(In fact it requires this even if you don't distribute the result, which is basically a EULA. Some Debian people actually *like* the fact that the GPL has a secret clickwrap licence provision.)

MPlayer Good - Debian Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is pure politics, and I can do without that, I only use software to fill a need nothing else.

The Problem...

[WPIDalamar]

From reading the flamewar that is the news thread, I got this much:

1) They use GPL & code under another license that isn't GPL compatible, plus their own code.
2) They never distributed a binary.
3) The released all that code.
4) Their code had an added clause that states you can't distribute binaries.

So the problem was, they used gpl & gpl incompatible code, so the resulting binary could not have been legal under any license. So they just simply didn't release a binary. I don't see a problem here. It's not against licenses to distribute GPL code next to gpl-incompatible code... it's just illegal to compile them together and distribute.

I'm afraid I'm missing the big deal here...

[Omega]

So after reading the whole thread it looks like the final outcome can be one of two possibilities:

• Either MPlayer adjusts its code and licenses to conform to Debian's rules in order to be added to the Debian distribution
• Or MPlayer doesn't change anything and they don't get included in the distro

So why the flame war? It's Debian's distro, they can set the rules as they like. Likewise it's entirely MPlayer's decision to conform or break Debian's distro rules. And if MPlayer doesn't want to be included in Debian, nothing stops users from compiling MPlayer by source and adding it to their system, right? It's not the end of the world if a program isn't available by apt-get.

Obviously if someone wants to fork MPlayer and create a version that is "Debian-able" they are certainly allowed to do that under the terms of the GPL. So I'm not quite sure why everyone's up in arms.

Re:I'm afraid I'm missing the big deal here...

[dinivin]

The issue, as pointed out by the Mplayer developers, is that Debian isn't consistent in the enforcement of their rules, making them seem quite hypocritical.

Dinivin

Re:I'm afraid I'm missing the big deal here...

[Xtifr]

The issue, as pointed out by the Mplayer developers, is that Debian isn't consistent in the enforcement of their rules

Debian makes mistakes -- everyone makes mistakes. But Debian usually tries to correct those mistakes. Back when Qt was GPL-incompatible, Debian briefly had KDE in the archives, which was a mistake. When someone pointed out the licensing problems, KDE was removed. At which point, the KDE folks went ballistic, and started shouting about how Debian was inconsistent and hypocritical because they had GPL'd packages using libForms (another GPL-incompatible library), and that proved that Debian had it in for the KDE folks, and it was all some evil plot. Unfortunately for this theory, Debian simply agreed that they'd made another mistake by accepting those packages, removed them, and that was the end of that.

Debian can be a little slow-moving at times (a common problem with all-volunteer groups), but if the complaints about Xine are valid, then I have no doubt that Xine will be gone (or fixed) soon enough.

Re:I'm afraid I'm missing the big deal here...

[Arandir]

Unfortunately for this theory, Debian simply agreed that they'd made another mistake by accepting those packages, removed them, and that was the end of that.

Except that when it was pointed out that some KDE based software was "legal", had the appropriate disclaimers, or didn't use the GPL, Debian still refused to accept them.

Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[dnaumov]

This flamewar once again shows the arrogance of the MPlayer developers:

> A user who can install a working xine package in 3 clicks won't care it runs
> 0.001% slower, if it just works.
A user who wants a movie player to install with 3 clicks can go use windows.

> Mplayer has unique features some people want to see in Debian, but if the
> legal status is still unclear, it just won't be done. Full stop.
Cool, at least we won't have to listen to the bugreports of binary package
users.

> Oh, yeah, you must think people wanting to use mplayer should make the
> effort of building it themselves, being rewarded of their efforts by
> having a working video player.
I know our opinions differ here, but YES.

> Then you are just a fucking elitist.
Unfortunately not, I only want to be :)

Those are just a few quotes from Gabucino, an MPlayer developer posting to debian-devel...

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[colinleroy]

This flamewar once again shows the arrogance of the MPlayer developers:

I think the point is done that people don't like mplayer's developers for their friendliness, but rather for their work. well.

A user who wants a movie player to install with 3 clicks can go use windows.

That's not totally false. I used to run macOS (9 then X) on my old laptop and i haven't been able to watch _any_ divx without an awful >60% framedrop. Mplayer is just smooth.
Ok, if Mplayer installed itself in three clicks it would be better. But ./configure && make && sudo make install isn't _that_ hard either; anyway _nothing_ install in 3 clicks on linux distros (apart maybe the packages that come on your distro's CD, for latest redhat or mandrake - maybe).

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[stor]

Doesn't suprise me in the least. These MPlayer dudes obviously think that they are doing something pretty special. Sad thing is they obviously can't write decent code that doesn't require a -O 1337 compile-time optimisation.

MPlayer will fade into obscurity (like XAnim has) as more capable developers e.g. Xine developers and Gstreamer developers write software that Just Works. The Gstreamer framework will be integrated into Gnome soon 8)

Cheers
Stor

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny. MPlayer will never go away. It's the only working player that doesn't crash. MPlayer has always worked for me since .1x times Xine has alot of bugs which cause no-functionality/freezing.

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Doesn't suprise me in the least. These MPlayer dudes obviously think that they are doing something pretty special. Sad thing is they obviously can't write decent code that doesn't require a -O 1337 compile-time optimisation.

As mplayer has runtime CPU detection, I assume you are surprised now?

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"Arrogance", no. "Intolerance", yes. I think if I were subject to the amount and kind of abuse heaped on them by people who don't agree with the focus that the MPlayer project has, I'd get pretty terse with people, too. Especially people emailling to say "you are just a fucking elitist"...

Think of it this way. Imagine you're a volunteer developer. Now imagine you're ALSO the tech support for the project.

NOW imagine some third party packages your project with their distribution.

Your phone starts ringing. Your email goes nuts. They're all saying "Your program is broken/deleted my files/raped my dog/etc.".

At first it's easy to be polite. "You say it doesn't work? Can you give me a description of what it's doing wrong? Um, I'll need more detail besides 'it doesn't run', does it give an error message of some sort? No? What does it do? Oh, it DOES give an error message. Can you tell me what it says? No, I mean read what it literally says...."

Not only does this sort of thing REALLY grate on any rational person's nerves very quickly, but it's extremely time-consuming to deal with and prevents you from actually DEVELOPING anything.

Having lurked on the MPlayer user mailing list for some time, I find myself actually somewhat sympathetic for the MPlayer developer's hard line on dealing with things like this.

Consider what MPlayer is SUPPOSED to be - the most capable and efficient media player available for *nix systems. This focus has never BEEN "make it pretty and simple", but rather "make it effective". This is an important point - everyone harassing the MPlayer team with demands (and they often are - "you have to make it easier to use", "this software cannot continue like this", etc.) are, in effect, trying to "hijack" the project into a different focus. MPlayer ISN'T XINE and isn't supposed to be. The Xine project IS more focussed on user-friendliness than MPlayer. That's by design.

The friction the MPlayer project seems to attract seems to come entirely from people who think they should change the focus of their project from what the DEVELOPERS want to what the complaintants want. This, to my mind, is silly. Xine is much simpler to use. If "simple to use" is what you want, Xine is the program you want. If you're willing to read some documentation and deal with slightly arcane and very flexible command-line arguments in exchange for broader capability and somewhat better performance, then MPlayer is what you want. Choice is good.

I think the "Xine vs. MPlayer" alleged war is about as real as the "Gnome vs. KDE" one, which is to say, not at all except for a few peripheral folks who THINK there is one. Xine and MPlayer seem to cross-pollinate ideas well enough. The Xine project figured out Sorenson 1 and wrote a native decoder. MPlayer said "great work, thanks" and incorporated the concept into MPlayer (Giving full credit to Xine, as I recall). They, in turn, managed to puzzle out use of windows DLL's to get Sorenson 3 decoding capability. From what I can see, I think this is now in the most recent Xine releases as well.

It's all good. Everyone relax. Nothing to see here....

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man. I agree. Never crashes. Xine crashes any time it encoders some obscure file. Let's not to mention that MPlayer's faster than anything else out there, and it supports many video and sound output formats.

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

That was "encounters", not "encoders". ;)

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, taking the quotes from the flame wars on the developer's mailing lists just to bury some people by exposing their arrogance... how many programmers would survive your brilliant attack?

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[stor]

>As mplayer has runtime CPU detection, I assume you are surprised now?

No not suprised. I'm glad it does.

Someone else claims that they are allowing binary distribution now and the "compile it yerself" attitude is from a long time ago.

If the above is true then perhaps this whole article has been miscommunication and a big fat waste of 0s and 1s.

Ahh well... 5 mins of my life I'll never get back ;)

Cheers
Stor

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[stor]

> MPlayer will never go away.

Well duh ;) I said "fade into obscurity" which means that it will be less popular but no, not vanish. Nothing Open Source/GPL will ever really "go away" as such. We see examples of this all the time.

> Xine has alot of bugs which cause no-functionality/freezing

True. For the most part it Works For Me though.

Cheers
Stor

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[soccerisgod]

I tell you, if I had any mod points left, I'd rate this insightful. Too bad I wasted them all on "IN SOVIET RUSSIA..." posts :[

Ah well, next time...

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[mst76]

Imagine the shock of realizing that free software developers do not have to suck up to their "customers".

Re:Their arrogance and elitism are astonishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, except in this case, those folk are the jerks who develop mplayer and can't stand the idea that anyone else on the planet can code as well or better than they can.

GPL isn't a law.

[Gadzinka]

the culprit is not the unwillingness to provide the source, but the prohibition of the distribution of binaries, thereby violating section 6 of the GPL: 'You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.'

Oh, for crying out loud, GPL isn't a higher law given by some divine force that's gonna strike us down.

GPL is just a convenient wording of several conditions for published program. All the conditions are binding for the user, not the author.

We've been over this several times and it was stated that author can specify any additional conditions, even contradicting the GPL. This was the case for GPL-incompatible BSD advertising clause. It's enough to add permission to link the GPL code against such restricted code.

Nobody, not even RMS himself can prevent me from publishing my software with GPL license and additional condition that this guy that kicked my ass in fifth grade cannot use this code.

Robert

Re:GPL isn't a law.

[rhavyn]

Thats all fine and dandy except when you start including other peoples GPL code which is what the MPlayer people were doing. They were adding restrictions to third party code which they have no right to do.

Re:GPL isn't a law.

[jbolden]

You are absolutely right. No one can restrict what license you put on your code. However a bad job of licensing your code can prevent anyone else from distributing it. For example taking the classic KDE case Debian Legal did believe that kde had the right to distribute kde they just didn't believe anyone else had the right due to the license mess.

Re:GPL isn't a law.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody, not even RMS himself can prevent me from publishing my software with GPL license and additional condition that this guy that kicked my ass in fifth grade cannot use this code.

That's right, you can do that if you want to.

Just remember that if you do, your software won't be in Debian. That's ok too. But don't do that, and then also complain about Debian not including your software.

Re:GPL isn't a law.

[pdh11]

They were adding restrictions to third party code which they have no right to do.

No. They were pointing out to those tempted to release MPlayer binaries, that while the MPlayer source is not a derived work of the GPL libraries (and so may be redistributed even though it has GPL-incompatible components), an MPlayer binary is a derived work and so may be used (the GPL nowhere prevents use) but not redistributed (GPL section 7).

Such was the MPlayer developers' interpretation of the GPL, and it was mine too: I've released sources into the public domain which linked against GPL libraries, on the same basis that the sources (which I release) are not a derived work even though any binaries (which I don't release) would be. However, this chap upthread seems to be saying I (and MPlayer) were wrong to do so. It does seem slightly cockeyed to me that the GPL works to prevent the release of public domain software, for instance to prevent the release of a Win32 version as public domain just because the Unix version links against Qt.

(Why is public-domain software GPL-incompatible? Because placing works in the public domain prohibits anyone, even the author, from claiming copyright on them; but the GPL requires that the author claim copyright.)

Peter

Please mod parent down as off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't believe the top article is just some cheap advertisemnt for VLC. VLC is nice, but it's a joke compared to the almighty MPlayer

Re:Please mod parent down as off-topic

[philovivero]

Except for the fact that I have nothing to do with the VLC project, other than a user that realises it's better than almost any other media player out there. And VLC is a Free (as in speech) GPL project, and doesn't have any budget for astroturfing.

It's very sad that some moderator actually listened to you and did mod the post off-topic, because it's very relevent. VLC is very, very nice.

Except, as I pointed out in my post, it doesn't handle the vast variety of formats mplayer does, so you still can't whack mplayer entirely.

VLC is unquestionably a far better DVD player, if for no other reason, it's not skinnable and just uses your GUI widgets the way an application should.

License trouble

[niom]

Every now and then there is some fuss in the Open Source community about license trouble. More often than not they are because of minor technicalities or it's even unclear if the trouble really exists or not.

I say, open source should be about computers and programming and not about law. If there is some small inconsistence in licenses that can be more or less safely ignored, let's ignore it. Being perfectly compliant with licenses is like provably optimum code, it can be a nice idea but in real world nobody is really interested about it.

IMO Debian should package mplayer (in fact it is already packaged, just search for it) and if somebody with a legal standing actually asksabout it being removed, then they can start to analyze the problem. No need to get out the way to find license problems that with all probability nobody will ever make a case of law about.

Re:License trouble

[jbolden]

it can be a nice idea but in real world nobody is really interested about it.

Huh? 16-24 year old students don't care but they aren't likely to get sued. Lots of Debian users most certainly do care about license issues. Not caring about license issues is a good way to end up broke

this is going somewhere bad fast

[thexdane]

i use mplayer, i like mplayer, i've had a few issues with certain mplayer builds but it gets fixed. i can see the developers point of doing binary distributions because they'd have to do different binaries cause of all the libs it can use, so one binary would have all the libs linked, one would have none, one would have only certain ones linked. you do the math and see how difficult it would be to support all those things

i've got no issue with debian, i think it's a good distro, tho i use gentoo and slack before that and i think slashdot ran on debian and maybe still does.

however with that being said this thread here is going to evolve into a flame war and pretty darn fast. with both sides having some good points.

i think the main thing about mplayer was one of the debian people not responding to them at all and going so far as to deny they even tried to contact him.

/covering butt on

this next part is only my opinion from what i've seen and it's not indictive of everyone in said community.
/butt covering off

/opinion

most of the debian users i've had the chance to meet i've found are more fanatical that stallman is about the gpl and most are rather unfounded about it. the gpl is good and all but the gpl isn't the answer to everything.

i've found that most of the users i've ran into have no real clue about the inner workings of the system or how to do basic things, like compiling from source cause there's no apt-get for the package, and will bitch and complain about not being gpl compliant without a clue on why their actually saying it, i'm sure the top guys are a bit more knowledgable than the users i've run into.
/opinion off

honestly i think everyone should just take a deep breath, count to 10 and look at this with clear heads, tho i doubt that will happen.

maybe one day we'll all get along with this nice little religous war we're having but i doubt it as well. so carry on and flame away

The correct spelling of "licence" is....

[Sexc0w]

L
I
C
E
N
S
E

License

How's Gentoo compared to other distros?

[digital photo]

I've been thinking of switching away from Suse Linux to Debian because of the ease of update. Everything else I end up re-building anyways...

I keep hearing about Gentoo Linux. How does it compare?

Re:How's Gentoo compared to other distros?

[Ozric]

Gentoo is great... I like being up to date on what I need. It does take some time to setup. An update works like this

#emerge sync -get the portage tree and md5s
#emerge -up world -see what needs updating
#emerge -u world -builds and installs

#etc-update -helps update your config files.

you will learn alot about libs and deps using Gentoo. Portage will help you out. I have nerver broken things too bad.

Lots of fun if you have a fast cpu.

What a clusterfuck

[NineNine]

This kind of childish shit is what keeps OSS in the dark ages. Why in the hell would I want to deal with a mess like that just to play some media files? I'd happily pay for Windows just not to have to deal with this childish garbage. My time is worth more than a Windows license or two.

Re:What a clusterfuck

[jbolden]

I'd say you are the one being childish. What do you think happens inside of Microsoft or IBM legal? The difference here is that everything is public. Frankly the Debian legal team seems to be pretty liberal as lawyers go, in real life lawyers will often say that they could easily win the suit but...

Re:What a clusterfuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, moron, its clusterfart

Re:What a clusterfuck

[NineNine]

Exactly. I, being the end consumer, dont' want to be in the middle of some childish legal fight... should I download this? Can I download this component or that one? Which version? Blech. It's a real mess.

Re:What a clusterfuck

[jbolden]

If you weren't reading Slashdot or Debian legal... but instead were just using the distribution you wouldn't be in the middle. It just wouldn't be part of your distribution and that would be that. Similarly for Redhat who has the same issue.

So what's the big deal?

[The Bungi]

It seems to me Debian is under no obligation whatsoever to include MPlayer in their dist. No apt-get, but then... so what?

The developer seems like he has a bit of a '1337' attitude there, but then again maybe he jumped into the open source thing without really thinking about what he was doing (he's effectively in a legal grey area wrt all the stuff he links to) and he just doesn't want to deal with all the politics. And there's plenty of that to go around in Debian, who are the GPL nazis of the world IMO.

He should just re-release his stuff under some other license (maybe a modified gzip that satisifies his problems with binary distribution) and just go on his way.

Re:So what's the big deal?

[josh crawley]

---He should just re-release his stuff under some other license (maybe a modified gzip that satisifies his problems with binary distribution) and just go on his way.

If they re-release MPlayer under a different license, dont they have to get permission from EVERY developer (from 1 line fix to 10000)?

Flame war? What flame war??

[ch-chuck]

woo+! I finally won!!
-
COMMAND? 5
TORPEDO COURSE (IN DEGREES)? 18.43
TRANSLATES TO 2.57778
TRACK: 7 - 7 6 - 8 5 - 8
KLINGON DESTROYED!

IT IS STARDATE 3457
THE FEDERATION HAS BEEN SAVED!
YOU ARE PROMOTED TO ADMIRAL
36 KLINGONS IN 36 YEARS. RATING= 1000
TRY AGAIN?

wtf? am i missing something?

[Ender Ryan]

From the mplayerhq.hu site... License

MPlayer is GPL now. In the past it contained non-GPL code from the OpenDivX project, which did not allow binary redistribution. This has been removed.

Standard Disclaimer:
Use only at your own risk! There may be errors and inaccuracies that could be damaging to your system or your eye. Proceed with caution, and although this is highly unlikely, we don't take any responsibility for that!

The MPlayer developers don't appear to be telling people they can't distribute MPlayer in binary form, they used to due to license issues, but not now.

And according to the MPlayer developers, they are no longer using any code that isn't distributable under the GPL.

Does anyone have a clue as to what the fuck is actually going on? What am I missing here?

Brawls inside companies just as vicious

[Goonie]

Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.

Re:Brawls inside companies just as vicious

[3am]

Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.


That would be fine if their flamewars were about technical issues, not license issues.

Re:Brawls inside companies just as vicious

[salimma]

No, but Debian is rather unique in being more decentralized and having weaker central authority. And as I mentioned, the ruckus over the Bitstream license seems rather unnecessary...

GPL Paradox -- appropriate response?

[Black Copter Control]

If a piece of software would otherwise violate the GPL, then source-only distribution is pretty much the only answer.

The GPL doesn't restrict what you can do with a piece of GPL code once you have it (to do otherwise would be a violation of the GPL). It only kicks in once you start distributing something with GPL code in it.

Similarly, the GPL can't prevent someone from distributing their own source code, even though it would (if compiled and linked with GPL code) not be legal to distribute.

In other words, if one feels that there may be GPL problems with their code, source-only distribution seems to be the appropriated thing to do.

Telling people not to distribute binaries is simply a warning to prevent them from violating the GPL themselves.

Not blatently sensible, and IANAL, but it seems to be legal.

Re:GPL Paradox -- appropriate response?

[JohnFluxx]

Read some of the other posts. As other people have pointed out, this probably wouldn't fly.

Steve jobs tried it, and was persuaded it wouldn't work. Go read the other posts for more info.

Re:GPL Paradox -- appropriate response?

[asuffield]

The issue is that the mplayer developers were distributing other people's GPLed code as part of their own. Their own code wasn't under the GPL at all (it was under "GPL+you can't distribute binaries").

Hear that, Microsoft!

[hackwrench]

That man admits to being a pirate of your software. Go get him.

Careful there...

[dark-nl]

I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we still occasionally find bits of non-free software that have slipped into the archive. Debian's resources for checking licenses are limited, and not every Debian developer has the same eye for license problems.

Mplayer developers know nothing of licensing...

[Heretik]

Film at 11.

Re:The correct spelling of "licence" is....

[pknoll]

Except in Great Britain, where it's "licence".

GPL violaters

[jbolden]

Instead, we should be going after the real offenders, the companies that violate the GPL to line their own profit margins.

Like who? Every time a company has violated the GPL and been notified they've backed down in like 2 seconds. Its non commercial entities that have fought it out for years.

Get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's their project and they can do whatever the hell they want.

And I happen to agree them on every single point.

These guys make a huge effort to develop really fast code that can play basically everything you'd need. Installing is just a question of "./configure && make && make install", so that packaging issue is really irrelevant.

And it won't work 0.001% slower on a precompiled system. It will run a lot (> 30%) slower since you'll have to compile for the lowest common denominator.

Re:Get over it

[korgull]

xine does detect your cpu capabilities at run time. Perhaps that doesn't give you the best, but you can see the advantage of that I guess.

Issues not come to surface

[amcguinn]

There may be some interesting issues concerning mplayer, but if so they have not come to the surface. I have been following the flame war for a few days, and there are posts from three groups of people:

Some Debian users who would like to see mplayer in Debian.

Some Debian developers who explain that it is difficult to make an mplayer package that can be distributed by people who are out in the open and can be profitably sued.

Some Mplayer developers who don't care if mplayer is in debian or not, and prefer if it isn't, but react explosively to any criticism.

Not that some of the criticism wasn't unjustified; as the abuse escalated some people were going to extraordinary lengths to try to make the case that mplayer isn't any good, which is a hard case to make, and not relevant anyway.

I would have thought (and I might be wrong), that it would be possible to make a package of the parts of mplayer that are clearly distributable as source or binary without legal problems, and produce plugins for the questionable bits which can be downloaded separately. However, it's pretty clear that anyone trying to do that will get no help from the mplayer developers, who are happier shipping a single source package from Hungary for users to compile themselves.

The actual legal issues haven't been gone into in any detail, except for a trivial one of a GPL'd file modified without proper change notices. There are obviously questions over patented codecs, use of binary codecs aquired as DLLs, and so on but no-one has calmed down enough to make a list and sort out the issues; largely as neither "side" of the argument either cares much what the answers are or trusts the other "side" to answer carefully-made arguments fairly.

As the dust settles, it may turn out that some enthusiast has just quietly gone away and made a working, legal .deb of mplayer that can be checked as a concrete construction. Until that happens, the whole discussion is moot anyway.

MPlayer - packaging - debian

[jjermann]

Hey men!

What has become of Slashdot? Is it really a non objective flaming pool? Did nobody care to take at least a _short_ look at it before commenting stuff?

I took a _quick_ look. IIRC it's about the following:

1. binary packages of MPlayer in general
2. debian packages made by Marillat
3. license issues of MPlayer (GPL)
4. patent issues of MPlayer
5. why is xine in debian and MPlayer not?
6. Gabu's "stile of speaking"

I (almost) didn't see any objective statement about it so far, just crap. :(

1. There exist binary packages of MPlayer (see http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer /)
Their attutude is: Better no packages than bad packages as they have to read all bugreports about them (not the distributions). IMHO they're right.

2. They work to get good debian packages, Marillats packages were refused because at the time he provided them, they were illegal and full of bugs. We still get lot of complains by ppl using Marillats packages...

3. The developer really worked hard to get a 100% GPLed software. Many issues (like libmpeg2 and xanim(?)) are solved through mails with the authors.

4. There are mpeg4 patent issues with libavcodec.

5. But: the exact same issues apply to xine!! (e.g. it uses libavcodec too)

6. no comment, just stay objective ;)

What I wanted to say: Please stay objective and don't start to write crap....

Re:MPlayer - packaging - debian

[Anonymous Coward]

"What has become of Slashdot? Is it really a non objective flaming pool?"

Do you REALLY want me to answer?

Re:The correct spelling of "licence" is....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to settle this:

licence ... 1a permission granted... 1b a document giving evidence of such permission...

(The New Penguin English Dictionary)

The dictionary goes on to say that "In British English, licence is the only spelling for the noun meaning 'freedom of action' or 'a document authorising the holder to do something'"; the verb "license" is used in the sense "we license you to.." but not "we issue this license to you".

It seems Americans can't tell the difference between nouns and verbs, so they use the same word for both.

MPlayer binaries suck

[Simon Lyngshede]

The real reason for not distributing mplayer binaries is performance. I tried using an MPlayer compiled for at different cpu than my own (running i386 on a i586) and I could really feel the difference in speed. If they want precompiled they will need a i386, i486, i586, i686, Athlon... and so on. Otherwise the users doesn't get the perfomance boost that the instructions in these cpu will give you. Also they need to distribute the different modules for videocards. My computer only handles mplayer well with the mga_vid module installed. Distributing binaries will just be to much work anyway so they should just drop it.

Why don't they just distribute mplayer like they do with Qmail, Ezmlm and other Bernstein programs ? Seems to work just fine. Although I hate that they start qmail without the use of supervise. (/service)

Re:MPlayer binaries suck

[G�tz]

I don't think this is true. MPlayer has runtime CPU detection for a while and will use MMX/SSE,... on your machine, even if you have compiled it on a i386. I have a slow machine and I didn't ever notice a performance penalty from CPU detection.

The mga_vid driver is included in the default kernel with Mandrake 9.0, along with the radeon driver.

Makes sense to me

[prockcore]

This is what the debian people aren't getting:

Some licenses are incompatible, even if they're all opensource. So what mplayer did was redistribute all the source, but you couldn't compile it together and redistribute it because of the license incompatibilities.

Distributing license-incompatible source together isn't illegal because it's not "linking". License incompatibilities don't come into effect until you link them together.

MPlayer does NOT have a license that says you can't redistribute binaries, but since compiling mplayer would link together incompatible licenses, that binary cannot be distributed without breaking the GPL.

So debian was free to redistribute binaries, as long as they didn't create binaries that linked in incompatible sources.

(This is about older versions of mplayer anyway.. the current versions of mplayer can and do have binaries being distributed)

Re:Makes sense to me

[asuffield]

> Distributing license-incompatible source together isn't illegal because it's not "linking". License
> incompatibilities don't come into effect until you link them together.

Where did you get this "linking" thing from? The GPL makes no mention of it. "Distributing license-incompatible source together" when one of the sources is licensed under the GPL and when they are designed to be compiled into a single program is illegal because clause 2b requires that any derivative work of GPLed code be licensed wholly and entirely under the GPL.

This is covered in the GPL FAQ.

'What is the difference between "mere aggregation" 'nd "combining two modules into one program"?' is a good place to start, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

> (This is about older versions of mplayer anyway.. the current versions of mplayer can and do have binaries being distributed)

This probably isn't true. There have been numerous attempts by various Debian developers to carefully analyse mplayer (since the mplayer developers have demonstrated before that their word cannot be trusted on this issue) with a view to packaging it, and they have all found license issues which prevent its inclusion. The latest one was fairly recent.

And Mandrake use PLF

[mickwd]

Mandrake packages who's legal or licencing status is uncertain are not supplied in the distribution.

However, many are available (including mplayer) in Mandrake RPM format via PLF (the embarrassingly-named Penguin Liberation Front).

Instructions are even included for setting that site up as a URPMI repository ('urpmi' being Mandrake's equivalent to 'apt-get' - installation of packages, automatically resolving and installing dependencies). Note however, that some PLF packages require packages from Mandrake contrib repositories.

Re:And Mandrake use PLF

[G�tz]

I'm currently maintaining the MPlayer packages for Mandrake and PLF. I must say that I hardly ever get complaints about missing features or problems caused by the runtime CPU detection.

The package in PLF contains almost every feature available in MPlayer and the only trouble people have caused by forgetting to add the Mandrake contribs to their urpmi sources, because they simply don't reat the FAQ on the PLF web site.

BTW I like the name and the logo, but of course I tolerate your different taste.

Re:And Mandrake use PLF

[mickwd]

As a happy user of MPlayer on Mandrake, thanks for your work on this.

WRONG! - Re:The correct spelling of "licence" is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try again.

According to this American dictionary, licence is a variant of license.

According to the English dictionary (i.e. from England) on my desk:

licence n. 1. a permit from the government or other authority to own or do something or to carry on a certain trade. 2. permission. 3. disregard of rules or customs etc., lack of due restraint in behaviour. 4 a writer's or artist's exaggeration, ot disregard of rules etc., for the sake of effect, poetic licence.

license v. to grant a licence to or for, to authorize; licensed premises licensed to sell alcoholic drinks.

Before you try to be a smart-arsed spelling, I suggest you learn your subject matter first.

Spelling

[Anonymous Coward]

License... not licence.

Too much energy on that.

[xadhoom]

I think that points of one of the bigger problems of opensource community. I like OpenSource, I like linux & related. But I hate seeing people speaking a lot of blah blah on silly things.
Seems that OpenSource commnunity likes all those blah blah. If that could be "converted" into coding energy or something like that, the opensource could really win the battle with proprietary.

Mplayer is on of the best players under linux, one of the most increasing in features and bugfixes. I can ignore Gabucino GPL violations , since I have a product that really works. And any other software like that that's fully GPL (any?) doesn't provide what mplayer does.

So the question is:
is better a very good product with a little (no binary) license problem (but I have the sources), or is better a fully GPL-compliant software that does only half of the things I need ?

Debian: stop whining

[Fefe]

What the hell, I have karma to burn.

If the Debian crowd spent one quarter of the time they whine and debate licensing bullshit doing actual productive work on their distribution, they would actually be getting somewhere.

Just look how Knoppix (which is Debian based) blew their installation system completely into pieces, and that's basically one guy doing this on his own.

Debian is well-known for the fanatic zealot followers and the fact that their releases are years behind the competition. People generally agree that the apt system is great. Why don't they do more stuff like apt and less stuff like trampling the mplayer people's nuts over bogus licensing bullshit? If they don't like the mplayer license, then they should not include mplayer in their distribution. End of dicussion. But please stop wasting everyone else's time.

Re:Debian: stop whining

[AlXtreme]

Zealot here, and i too can burn some karma :o)

KNOPPIX wasn't made to install Debian, all that Knopper did was include a script (knx-hdinstall), made by Christian Perle, that works reasonably well.

Blow the debian installation into pieces? well, all it does is copy everything to harddisk. For i386. With far less flexibility. If you call that blowing into pieces then imho you don't get what Debian stands for: a free GNU/Linux distribution focussing on security, stability and flexibility, and not having the easiest installer on the planet or shipping broken unstable software.

And about mplayer: it's not the maintainers wanting it, it's the users asking for it :o)

Re:Debian: stop whining

[momobaxter]

Does Knoppix work on Alphas, Sparcs, PowerPCs and numerous other achitectures other than x86?

Until it does, the installer means dick. Debian wants a consistent experience for EVERY platform it supports, from installer to package management.

This is why there is no real GUI installer yet, there isn't one that runs on all platforms correctly.

Re:Debian: stop whining

[GiMP]

Wow.. Debian *STABLE* releases contain older, more stable software.

So what if Debian's stable releases are long and far between? They still release much more often than Microsoft, Apple, and Sun do and with many more applications.

If you've ever ran Debian 'testing' or 'unstable', you would realize that NO other distribution or operating system is nearly as upto-date as Debian. It is only the 'stable' branch that is older, with good reason.

Re:Debian: stop whining

[10Ghz]

HAH! I run Debian Unstable. KDE3 is nowhere to be seen (sure, there are some unofficial packages available). when was it released? Oh, about 8 frigging months ago! How about Xfree 4.2? It took only about 9 months for it to show up in Unstable. So what was that about being "up to date"?

Re:Debian: stop whining

[GiMP]

Generally it is better updated than any other, although you are right about Xfree4.2.

I won't bother to check about KDE3, but I've heard complaints about it before.. I don't use KDE so I don't particularly care if it is included or updated.

Outside those packages, *most* are well maintained and frequently updated.. much more than any other distribution.

Re:Debian: stop whining

[10Ghz]

Generally it is better updated than any other, although you are right about Xfree4.2.

It seems to me that bigger and more important packages are delayed in Debian. Sure, some "yetnothercardgame.0.3.44" gets updated quickly, but heaven help us when it comes to something like KDE or Xfree!

I won't bother to check about KDE3, but I've heard complaints about it before.. I don't use KDE so I don't particularly care if it is included or updated.

Well I use KDE, so it matters to me. And Debian has been a major disappointment to me. I started using it because of the ease of installing packages and it being up-to-date. Yes, installation is still easy, but up-to-date it is not. That is why I'm moving to Gentoo. Installation is just as easy (I don't mind the compiling, in fact, I prefer it) and it's REALLY up-to-date! For example, KDE3.1 was available BEFORE it was announced at kde.org!

Outside those packages, *most* are well maintained and frequently updated.. much more than any other distribution.

Really? To me it seems that Gentoo is leaps and bounds more up-to-date than Debian is!

BTW, does Debian have OpenOffice? I really would like to know because I can't install it via apt-get. I would find it rather surprising if Debian didn't have such important piece of software available...

Re:Debian: stop whining

[GiMP]

> It seems to me that bigger and more important
> packages are delayed in Debian. Sure, some
> "yetnothercardgame.0.3.44" gets updated quickly,
> but heaven help us when it comes to something like
> KDE or Xfree!

I believe this is something that has come with maturity. As more users use Debian, it becomes increasingly more important to make sure that major updates in important packages have no breakages. It is a minor problem if "yetanothercardgame" breaks, but it is a major problem if Xfree or KDE breaks.

Debian has OpenOffice:
apt-get install openoffice.org

Re:Debian: stop whining

[10Ghz]

Debian has OpenOffice:
apt-get install openoffice.org

Funny, every time I try that, it complains about not finding the packages or something.

it ain't?

[zogger]

--correct me if my understanding is incorrect, regardings the major distro vendors and GPL code. They sell cd media, printed dead trees manuals and custom support options, but the code itsef is not sold, it's freely given away. Now they could charge a reasonable fee, if they chose to, for downloading as well, but that's a delivery/bandwith/infrastructure fee for still *free* code.

Re:it ain't?

[chromatic]

Your understanding is incorrect. See Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Re:it ain't?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, someone might buy a CD with RedHat, Debian, whatever on it. Would they pay the same amount for a blank CD?

No?

Then they're paying for the code.

Re:it ain't?

[Dysan2k]

I am not a lawyer-monkey, so I'm not terribly sure about something here.

I can definately see where GPL allows you to sell your own software, and via the provided link, means I must provide a means for people to get the source to the package. But my question is, doesn't the GPL license grant the right for re-distribution by any party? IE. one person gets the source and distributes source only so everyone else can compile it? Or am I thinking WAY too far outside the box?

Re:it ain't?

[chromatic]

I'm not sure what you mean.

If I write a piece of software, hold the copyright on it, and make it available under the GPL, the GPL gives me no additional rights. I'm not bound by the GPL; as creator and copyright holder, I'm free to charge for the software. I'm free to distribute it under as many licences as I desire. I'm free to relicense it to whomever I choose.

The GPL only covers the rights of third parties who distribute code to which they do not hold copyright. The restriction there is that these third parties must make the code -- or code derived from the code -- available under the same terms as they received it.

Put another way, Red Hat can take my GPLd program and distribute it freely. They can charge for it. They can modify it. If they distribute it to you, either freely or for a fee, they must allow you the same options.

Re:it ain't?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how it goes:

I can take the Linux kernel source, strip out any credit given to any author, rename it Loonux and sell the source for $5000 US per copy. Unmodified.

If you shell out $5000 for it, you can give it away to whomever you like, modify it, destroy it, or sell it again for any price you can name, as long as you sell the source under the GPL and grant the same rights that you had to your customer.

Re:it ain't?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they aren't. They're paying for the convenience of someone else gathering it together, burning it on a CD, and stocking it at the local store.

Sorry, this doesn't work

[JoeBuck]

This attempt at working around the GPL by having the user build the app has been tried before, by no less than Steve Jobs. Apple's Objective-C compiler was and is GCC-based, but originally Jobs wanted it to be proprietary. Apple came up with a scheme where the equivalent of a Makefile would take a pristine GCC tarball, plus the proprietary patch, apply it, and build a proprietary Objective-C compiler. However, the FSF lawyer (Eben Moglen) found precedents that he could use to convince Apple's lawyers that this strategy would fail. The reason is this: Apple would build and test the binary in house. They had a mechanism that would cause the bit-for-bit identical binary to appear on the user's disk. They have in effect created a mechanism for distributing a binary, and this binary is a derivative work of GCC. They can't do this without a license from the FSF. The details of the mechanism don't matter. The "mere aggregation" exception doesn't apply because the pieces being distributed are not logically separate.

Now, this gets us into a very controversial area: lots of folks object to this concept, because if taken to an extreme it would appear to prohibit people from telling other people how to do patches. Nevertheless, the Mplayer people should not assume that they have come up with a safe and legal way to mix GPL and non-GPL code. If they provide a Makefile that creates a binary, in a way that the binary the user gets is the same one they have, then they could well be sued by the owners of whatever GPL software they use.

Re:Sorry, this doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

What binary is being created bit-for-bit on mplayer users systems?

and, btw, STFP (stop the ... presses), what about debian's own PINE!?

Re:Sorry, this doesn't work

[morgue-ann]

if taken to an extreme it would appear to prohibit people from telling other people how to do patches

I see this as prohibiting people from distributing patches to GPL'd code privately and telling the recipient that they may not pass the patch to others. Just posting a patch, no matter how egregious, in a "public" place, should be OK, though it seems the patch would have to be GPL'd.

Hey Joe Buck! I remember you from the old days on comp.dsp. Remember this thread? I was so much younger then....

-Morgan

---
Eisner vs. Eisner

Re:Sorry, this doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Difference with the mplayer:
- They didn't have a mechanism to have a bit-for-bit identical binary.
- If I'm not mistaken people could even build a library without using the GPL library with a configure options: e.g. build a binary that is not a derivative work of the included GPL library.

Whoops: s/Apple/NeXT/

[JoeBuck]

Sorry, I goofed; yes, it was Steve Jobs, but the Objective-C compiler was a NeXT product.

and another Re:Well, look at their...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they link to other people's codex then distributing binaries would cause them to violate copyright of other big companies and get shutdown. Think apple quicktime. If they call the quicktime api, that is fair-use of the code and they won't directly get in trouble. Requiring the user to compile the program puts the responsibility to get a legal copy of the apple file in their own lap rather than Mplayer's.
my 2 cents

You are completely mistaken

[DennisZeMenace]

What you're pasting in your post is not the list of MPlayer problems, it's the list of Xine problems. The Mplayer authors were just trying to prove that there's a double standard here. Xine has as many problems as MPlayer, yet it's included in Debian.

The Debian people, though, have responded that they'll look into those Xine issues and that if they turn out to be true they'll yank Xine out of Debian too.

DZM

Re:You are completely mistaken

[Anonymous Coward]

Mplayer versus Xine is just politics.

The real problem is that the GPL prohibits distribution of MPEG4 implementations in the US.

It's time that Debian started taking the GPL's patent clause just as seriously as the rest of the GPL and stop winking at obvious GPL violations just because it would be convienent for people.

That means ripping out any MPEG4 player, MP3 code, TrueType hinter, and ASF implementation. Tough shit.

Since everyone collectively decided to agree with RMS's view on patents by accepting the GPL, they damn well should enforce it.

Missing the point

[TFloore]

Some licenses are incompatible, even if they're all opensource. So what mplayer did was redistribute all the source, but you couldn't compile it together and redistribute it because of the license incompatibilities.

If you can't legally redistribute, then most likely you can't legally compile it either.

This is what you don't seem to understand. The binary result has the same license as the source. If the source licenses are incompatible, the binary is illegal.

But it's okay it the user makes the illegal binary instead of the developers? This is your argument?

Re:Missing the point

[prockcore]

The binary isn't illegal. Distributing it is. Take the GPL license for example.. it only governs redistribution. You can pretty much ignore the GPL if you don't distribute binaries. For example, You can munge it deep inside your proprietary code, as long as it's for personal use.

So someone compiling two differently licensed sources together to create one binary isn't illegal as long as it's for personal use.

Re:Missing the point

[rhavyn]

As has been pointed out in other places in this thread, if it can be shown that the developers are making a binary and providing a way for users to make a bit by bit identical binary then its equivalent to distributing the binary. NeXT tried it with their Objective-C compiler (now you know why gcc has objective-c support). Either way, if the objective of the developer is to circumvent the license (and that most definitely was the objective of the mplayer developers) then finding an alternate way of providing the user with the binary is just as bad as sending the binary yourself.

Re:Missing the point

[GiMP]

The GPL makes it impossible to link to non-GPL code. However, it is not illegal to distribute code that cannot be compiled.

The developers of MPlayer did not break the GPL by distributing source code. Users whom linked GPL code with non-GPL code broke the GPL.

Although it may not be 'ok' for users to make illegal binaries, the developers of the software are not to blame. The MPlayer developers simply made a note stating that it could not be compiled legally, which was responsible.

Sorry people...

[protonman]

Hi all,

This is the story submitter, and I must appologise for causing this much confusion. I read the blurb on the mplayer homepage and thought it would be interesting for you /. people. Skimmed the mailinglist a bit and wrote a little something on what I thought was the most "newsworthy" part of the flame war.

As it turns out, the issue is much more complicated than I made it look, and instead of entertaining the /. crowd with a insightful view on OS politics I did nothing but confuse matters more.

If I were an editor on this website, I would have refused my submission.

I'd like to apologise not only to the /. crowd, but also to the debian and mplayer developers whom this concerns.

Sorry again,

Protonman.

ps. Licence/License? I don't really care, I'm not a native speaker. :-P

Re:Sorry people...

[Tim C]

ps. Licence/License? I don't really care, I'm not a native speaker. :-P

It depends on what country you're from. In the US, I believe, it's license. Here in the UK, licence is the noun, while license is the verb - eg "I will license it to you under the terms of the Foo licence."

That's one argument against picking holes in people's spelling in posts to websites; you have to be pretty sure it's not jsut a regional variation...

my favorite quote

[Xtifr]

From the MPlayer home page:

Why does debian-legal think they know what is GPL and what is not better than Mplayer and XAnim authors.

Well, gee, I don't know, why would a bunch of people who study licensing issue on a regular basis think they understand licensing issues better than a bunch of people who are focused on writing code?

Having programmers look for legal problems makes about as much sense as having lawyers review your code for possible bugs.

A complete and utter non-issue...

[dinotrac]

The mplayer folks are entitled to package and license their software as they see fit.

The Debian folks are entitled to package and distribute Debian as they see fit.

Reminds of the KDE dustup.

That's when I switched from Debian to SuSE.
Glad I did.
Similar options abound for anyone who doesn't like the way Debian does things.

Re:A complete and utter non-issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

The mplayer folks are entitled to package and license their software as they see fit.

Exactly - the Mplayer developers can do what they want with the lines of code THEY wrote. The problem is they are using other people's GPL code, which means they can only distribute the project under the GPL license.

If the Mplayer developers do not allow this, they are violating the license and have forfeited ALL rights to use the code they have borrowed.

This means the Debian project can do whatever they want with Mplayer as long as they do not violate GPL - they don't even have to ask. The problem is that they Mplayer developers claim it to be GPL while several codecs they distribute from their homepage are more or less stolen.

Another Great PR Move for the GPL

[Chris Burke]

I don't get it.

What part of "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." do you not understand?

It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public.

Yeah, because not distributing software for people who don't comply with the terms of the license under which they recieved the source code that they are using sure is idiotic zealotry!

Debian needs principles more than they need you.

[Bruce Perens]

It's not even "ethics" you're talking about. Debian doesn't want to distribute software in violation of the license, even when that's the way the copyright holder provided it to them. It's possible for the copyright holder to change his mind and sue them at any time. They went through this for two years or so with KDE, it was very painful but the result was positive for everyone - Troll fixed its licensing.

Gentoo can include everything it wants, until the day they get into legal trouble. Then, they'll start taking rules from the Debian policy manual.

Bruce

right.

[twitter]

debian-legal has no clue what they are talking about

So, you do? Sure, I'm going to trust some AC over the Debian legal team.

Re:right.

[Anonymous Coward]

so I'm going to register just to get karma? I posted my name, thankyouverymuch

you can email me at seth at tautology.org if you want, as well. I'm a real live person with a name.

Re:right.

[JohnFluxx]

I think it's more of:

a) The debian-legal people have quite a lot of respect from a lot of people, and a lot of credibility.

b) As it stands, you have ZERO credibility.

Re:right.

[haloscan]

Maybe you should actually read what he said and research if what he said is accurate or not for yourself instead of having 'Debian legal team'/'Anonymous Coward' do the thinking for you.

Re:right.

[toriver]

Sure, I'm going to trust some AC over the Debian legal team.

Because, as everyone knows, even of you're well-respected outside of Slashdot, your opinion on Slashdot is worthless unless you register.

Gee, the open-source community is so inclusive...

The Project From Hell

[Caiwyn]

MPlayer has been referred to as "The Project From Hell" with good reason. This story is just the latest in a long history of less-than-professional behavior from the project's authors. I find it quite humorous that MPlayer's authors accuse everyone under the sun of violating the GPL when their own code is suspect.

MPlayer might play every format, but the software is not particularly intuitive for someone who just wants to play the occasional video clip, the authors see fit to throw public temper tantrums on the project's website, and their support has garnished a lackluster reputation due to the attitude of the authors toward the uninitiated.

The simple answer to the question of why Xine gets more respect from major distributions is that Xine's authors conduct themselves with a far more professional attitude. Remember the MPlayer/Red Hat spat? MPlayer's authors refused to even deal with anyone using Red Hat 7.x because they claimed the compiler that shipped with Red Hat was buggy and problematic, when in fact it was their own code that was not up to the level of C compliance that the compiler required.

You attract more flies with honey. As it is, I don't even bother with MPlayer. Xine, coupled with the gXine frontend, makes a fantastic video player as far as I'm concerned, and it's far more intuitive. I'll take a friendly project over a back-biting one any day.

Re:The Project From Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

"when in fact it was their own code that was not up to the level of C compliance that the compiler required."

heh? non-compliant code may cause compiler internal errors? miscompiled code? it should cause compiler warnings/errors. otherwise it IS compiler's fault.

A'rpi/MPlayer team

Re:The Project From Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

> You attract more flies with honey

You speak as only someone who has not seen black clouds of flies swarming rotten meat can. I understand it's a proverb, but it's incorrect and cliched. You would communicate more effectively if you avoided using it.

Further, I don't understand why everybody has such trouble with mplayer. It was easy to compile, plays anything, and doesn't crash all the time like Xine does.

Re:The Project From Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Unprofessional behavior? Oh no!!

You think that might have something to do with the fact that Mplayer isn't a professional project, it's free? You know, free as in they do this for no money, and we all get a decently stable media player that plays more video formats than WMP9, for nothing?

If you want professionalism from developers, try paying for software. If you want an ugly un-intuitive interface to half of mplayer's codecs, try Xine. If you want a player that works right out of the box with any format you throw at it, doesn't cost you a nickle, and doesn't report back to Borg HQ, try Mplayer.

Re:The Project From Hell

[praedor]

You attract more flies with honey. As it is, I don't even bother with MPlayer. Xine, coupled with the gXine frontend, makes a fantastic video player as far as I'm concerned, and it's far more intuitive. I'll take a friendly project over a back-biting one any day.

Ahem. Flies are not butterflies, they tend to like what we would define as waste material. Rotting food, feces, are the preferred fly attractant. You will draw more flies with shit rather than honey. You will draw ants and perhaps bees with honey.

Does Xine play sorenson codec (QT)? I don't know so I ask. Can it play wma? If the answer is no to either question then I will stick with Mplayer. I have had no problems getting Mplayer working just fine. There are all those simple GUIs for it too. I see no way that it is less intuitive than Xine. Really.

Re:The Project From Hell

[Ben Hutchings]

Do you not understand the meaning of the term "undefined behaviour" in the C and C++ standards? It certainly does include the possibility of internal errors and "wrongly" compiled code. Of course it is preferable for the compiler to report an error instead, but there is no general requirement for it to do so.

Re:The Project From Hell

[dvdeug]

miscompiled code? it should cause compiler warnings/errors. otherwise it IS compiler's fault.

A compiler's not magic. It can't detect all code which has illegal aliasing. (It's equivalent to detecting whether a Turing machine will return a value.) So it will probably produce miscompiled code for some code that's illegal. Still your bug. Even ICE's on non-complaint code are legal, though not friendly.

Go right ahead and see how much people here care

[Vicegrip]

Obviously you're just a troll saying stuff to annoy people.

Reminds me of a recent discussion.

Re:The correct spelling of "licence" is....

[karearea]

Only in countries where the President can't spell correctly.
The rest of the world is OK with spelling licence correctly.

angels on heads of pins

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is useless and a waste of time. The GPL has never been challenged in a court of law. It remains an idealism by a bunch of bearded hippies that don't bathe and abstain from humour and critical thinking.

The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I do respect their ability to code and all.

But the mplayer team (core from .HU), seem to have a rather shady side. For one, they come up with these ridicious arguments, making jabs at people and all.

From all this, I feel this is kinda like a publicity stunt, these people want to publicize mplayer by creating this whole cloud of negativity around it. It's simply not cool.

If you've ever posted on the mplayer mailing list, you'd find this attitude at the core. Mplayer developers (arpi and co) seem to think that they are gods, and that everyone else is wrong etc.. They are also heavly into warez and stuff on their .HU irc server (btw). If a newbie asks a simple question on their mailing lists, they would flame you to death, not only that, they would port scan you, and even try to enter some ports (for what reason? .. also remember arpi is one of the guys responsible for hungarian attacks on irc a few years back).

If you read their documentation (earlier ones) you'd see how less they understand the freesoftware movement. When they were not fully GPL, they had all sorts of crap about the FSF and GPL posted all over their site, things that no respectable software developer would even write. These people are simply script kiddies with no respect for the free software movemnet and community (as representated by debian).

I dont understand why they have to make such a mighty fucking issue out of all these things, just make the fucking software and let maintinaers package it as they wish.

Mplayer is very cool, but their ego is a bit too retarded. I hope they learn that they are not the greatest or biggest software team out there. I hope they stop this attitude. Also the posting on their main site seem like a declaration of war against debian (geez?!)

Ziel from the GNome I18N team.

Re:The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Write Linux frontend for everyone else's codecs which are executed at runtime without the authors' permission, breaking numerous licenses.
2. Insult everyone who dares criticise the project.
3. Insult everyone who dares criticise you for insulting everyone.
4. ???
5. Profit!!!!

Re:The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, I've long ago concluded that the included windows-dll's from mplayer site are warez. Where the hell did they get them from?? From a microsoft windows OS? did they get a licence for that? from other software? etc.. And why in the world would these dll's not work in windows?! I'd like to know for one thing, where they got these from.

Re:The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

Codecs are free for download and use, Microsoft does not provide a seperate license for these. Infact, on their own site, microsoft lets you "update" your own codecs periodically, therefore: codecs can be seen to be seperate from the OS and thus not fall under the license.

Distributing codecs is pretty helpful, for example, the Real player people, if more people used their codecs via 3rd party software (mplayer), then their standard could get a wider adoption (see how bad their player is under linux, vs how good mplayer is with the same codecs).

In general, codecs should be treated as free software (I mean free in the shareware sense -- without sourcecode generally, but free for all use). Codecs should be as tranferable as a document you write in word that you e-mail a friend. Then and only then can great video codecs gain popular usage across a wide varity of platforms.

Also, it might be possible that the developers at mplayer, did their own codecs (from what I learn the dll's would not work under Windows). This would void any theories of the codecs itself being warez.

I support mplayer and their right to bring quality video onto our Linux desktops.

Re:The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

"also remember arpi is one of the guys responsible for hungarian attacks on irc a few years back"

WTF?

A'rpi/MPlayer team
(who don't even understand what 'attacks on irc' means)

Re:The Mplayer team

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL :)))))))
A'rpi didn't even know the difference between different IRC networks when MPlayer development started (few years ago), and even now can't even use an eggdrop or other IRC bot, not to mention how to do "attacks on ircnet" :)))))

--
Gabucino
MPlayer Core Team

Rubbish

[kyz]

making a perfectly modular approach while supporting so many different formats and codecs is easier said than done.

But it has been done -- in Xine.

Reverse-engineering is the perfect solution, but in practice it can only be done for simple things.

You clearly don't know how difficult (read: easy) it is to do reverse engineering. It only takes a skilled reverse-engineer (of which there are thousands in this world, most of them are ex-crackers), time and interest.

I've reverse engineered decompression algorithms far more difficult than SVQ3's decoder. Although I haven't seen it, there are rumours that SVQ3 has been reverse-engineered and posted anonymously to Usenet. They say it's just H.263 with some scrambling tables, so Sorensen can claim copyright infringement (of those tables) if anyone writes a decoder. All WMV and WMA codecs have been reverse-engineered. There is nothing mystical or special about a multimedia codec, it's just an algorithm like anything else.

One last example, the even more difficult Microsoft Media Player DRM has been flawlessly reverse-engineered (not by me), despite being actively encrypted and made difficult to run through.

The MPlayer authors are rarely the guys behind reimplementing codecs -- that's what the authors of ffmpeg (libavcodec) do. MPlayer just takes the glory by putting it all together.

Re:Rubbish

[DennisZeMenace]

But it has been done -- in Xine.

But Xine doesn't have 20% of MPlayer's features. You can't compare Xine and MPlayer in terms of code base. Still, i'm totally willing to agree that Xine has much cleaner code (i don't really know), but that doesn't prove much. Xine is certainly not more stable than MPlayer.

I stand corrected for the reverse-engineering aspect, though you make it sound strangely easy. Yet I don't see any open-source decoders based on those rev-eng efforts out there, even hosted in copyright-liberal countries. But anyway, f, however, reproducing the scrambling tables is illegal, then there's no perfect solution to this problem. So don't blame MPlayer's people for going to the easier DLL solution then!! All i want is a linux player that plays Sorensen v2 and 3 (and no, Crossover doesn't qualify).

The MPlayer authors are rarely the guys behind reimplementing codecs -- that's what the authors of ffmpeg (libavcodec) do. MPlayer just takes the glory by putting it all together.

You make it sound like the MPlayer authors are just a bunch of code thieves, which is completely untrue. They wrote a lot of the codecs and work closely with a lot of the projects they borrow code from. Everybody knows ffmpeg is not MPlayer, nor is it Xine (which also uses it).

DZM

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again I ask....are you an asshole? It's ok that you are. Admitting you have an asshole problem is the first step to getting you the help you so clearly need.

........asshole.

Re:Rubbish

[noda132]

But Xine doesn't have 20% of MPlayer's features.

Which 80% is missing? Besides mencoder, it seems to me they're about neck-and-neck. Xine has the huge advantage of separating its libraries from its UI.

Not to downplay the usefulness of mencoder, but Xine has most of the features MPlayer has, and they're implemented much better.

Re:Rubbish

[Ian-K]

I can't say much about which has more features, but I'll say that xine's interface is, lets say, not particularly well designed. (Read: it's bl**dy awkward to use sometimes).

I had to use xine for quite a while to play any mp3/mpg/mpeg files, when I'd screwed up my first RH8 install, and... I've seen better UIs.

Overall a great program, though. But I like mplayer better. A lot easier to use, imho :-)

Trian

Re:Rubbish

[noda132]

I can't say much about which has more features, but I'll say that xine's interface is, lets say, not particularly well designed.

Maybe you were using the default skin? I'll agree, it's horrible. The 'cloudy' skin (which comes with Xine-ui) is great.

Also, Xine's libraries are used in a few other apps, most of which have simpler interfaces.

Re:wtf? am i missing something?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

As *I* understand it (disclaimer - I have NOT been reading the aforementioned flamewar) there are a couple of issues here, none of which are really worth flaming over:

One issue is that while the "core" of MPlayer really is GPL (and as far as I can tell, nobody at MPlayer has ever actually tried to stop anyone from distributing binaries), a couple of the features that MPlayer is best known for - ability to play "Windows Media" and now even QT with Sorensen 3 video codec - REQUIRES use of windows DLL's, which are obviously not GPL and can't be redistributed.

This leads the next issue, which is the MPlayer developers' legendary (both in the sense of "famous" AND, in my opinion, in the sense of "greatly exaggerated") intolerance for bad or irrelevant bug reports and questions that are dealt with in the rather extensive documentation they've gone to the effort of making available. Having lurked on the MPlayer-user mailing lists for quite some time now, I can say that there is SOME truth to this, but that callousness towards this sort of thing isn't totally unjustified.

Precompiled binaries for MPlayer would, quite frankly, grossly increase the incidence of harassment and bogus complaints that the MPlayer development team would have to wade through. Firstly, that "Hey, MPlayer's supposed to play quicktime now, but the Debian/RedHat/Mandrake/Slackware/Somethingorotheri x package doesn't do it! It must be a bug! Fix it!" would be reported repeatedly...due to the fact that the Windows DLL's that would have to be distributed with the packages...can't. Secondly, complaints that "MPlayer is the slowest piece of crap I ever tried to run! Bug! Fix it!"...caused by having a pile of different distributions almost certainly only compiling for 486 or Pentium optimizations (rather than having a complete separate binary package for each CPU)...whereas the MPlayer developers have put a great deal of effort, from my perspective, setting up the source code configure script as painlessly simple and automatic as possible. "./configure ; make ; make install" really is all it should ever take to generate binaries optimized for one's own system. Really.

And, of course, there's the problem with each distribution (and each VERSION of each distribution) having a different precompiled binary package. Despite the package coming from the distributor, a huge proportion of the "bug" reports and complaints will be directed at the MPlayer developers rather than the distributor (MPlayer has an entire page discussing the problems with the buggy GCC 2.96 that RedHat included some time back and the fact that people were STILL complaining that the problems with GCC 2.96 were MPlayer's fault, as an example of this).

Dealing with all of that noise is distracting and time consuming. Considering how fast and how well MPlayer has developed over the last year, I think the developer's strong focus on trying to avoid a deluge of this kind of distraction is paying off...

They DO have a fairly complete explanation in their online documentation of what they need to know to be able to do anything useful with a bug report, and I can say that from what I've seen, when people actually bother to follow those guidelines, the developers are actually quite responsive. I just think they've gotten a bit touchy after years of people not bothering to notice the widely-scattered "please read bugreports.html" notices and pop onto the list with posts like "I, like, tried to play the Italian release of the "JoeSchmoe's Dungeon of Pleasure" DVD and it didn't work. What's wrong?"...

Disclaimer - As someone who's done over a decade of tech-support now, I am probably somewhat biased in favor of people who are trying to get work done while being yelled at for things that aren't their fault (or even under their control)...

So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because they won't be optimized and will lack functionality, both of which they're likely to get a lot of undeserved blame for. On the other hand, there ARE (widely regarded as suboptimal and/or buggy) binary distributions available, and I don't recall ever seeing MPlayer developers actually try to STOP them (though they may "discourage" instead). If Debian wants to distribute versions of MPlayer that only include a limited "known GPL-safe subset" of features, they CAN...they just SHOULDN'T. I suspect that's where the conflict is.

If there are other issues, I don't know about them, but I imagine someone else will have posted them here by the time I get done typing all of this and post it.

Re:Dear Fascist (Read "Bush") Sympathizer:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's curious that the people who think it is unUSian to critise Bush, are those very same people who were slagging off Clinton all the time.

Simple solution to the no-binaries issue..

[robbo]

1. Distribute the rpm or deb as a tar archive that installs in /tmp
2. make sure the rpm or deb depends on all the nifty things you want to include, as well as gcc.
3. post-install:

#!/bin/sh
cd /tmp/mplayer-src;
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
cd /tmp
rm -rf ./mplayer-src

Re:Simple solution to the no-binaries issue..

[JohnFluxx]

Won't work, as mentioned lots of times above.

Who moderated this up? Jeez, you think that if there was a simple solution then perhaps the debian-legal team would have come up with it.

Re:Simple solution to the no-binaries issue..

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the license. You do not get an exception from the GPL just because you distribute as source. It doesn't even matter if they were to distribute their own source code and other contributions completely separately - Mplayer is still a derived work based on the GPL components they are using, and as such they have to distribute it under the GPL.

Re:Simple solution to the no-binaries issue..

[robbo]

I'm not referring to license issues wrt plugins, but the claim on the deb list that the app needs to be customized to the present hardware- i386 vs i686, MMX, etc, etc. The only problem I see with this approach is that of ensuring the dependencies are detected properly, but that's the whole point of apt, rpm, and autoconf, at varying levels of abstraction. What's the difference if the debian installer does it or the user does it ten minutes later?

Re:Simple solution to the no-binaries issue..

[JohnFluxx]

As it stands, you cannot get a legal binary.
Trying to get round it by distributing just the code doesn't fix it.

If the problem was just that some of the plugins are bad, then they could try to do that. Indeed the current debian package tries to hack out all the "bad" code and do this.

Having different packages optimised for different machines is dead easy, and no problem.

Gentoo

[Synn]

I used Debian for several years and still use it on the servers I administer. Before then I used a little Red Hat and before then Slackware.

Gentoo is very similar to Debian in the way the packaging system works. You simply tell them what to get and they download and install it and anything else it requires.

Debian distributes binaries which are pre-compiled for your platform. For intel they're compiled against the 386 I believed. Debian is also slow to update due to testing, but that in turn makes it quite stable and reliable.

Gentoo is a bit more of a tinkerers OS. It downloads the source code for any package you want to install and it compiles it custom to your PC. My Gentoo system is compiled specifically for my Athalon XP system.

Also Gentoo tends to update more quickly than Debian, in part because just throwing the sources at your users is easier than packaging up and compiling/testing yourself.

I enjoy using Gentoo on my desktop OS, but I wouldn't use it on a server until it matures a little more. I also wouldn't use it on a slow computer as compiling source code can take awhile. I also wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't want to know what's going on under the hood of their desktop.

Gentoo by the way it's setup tends to walk users through the a lot of the core functions that make your OS tick. It doesn't hide your config files in GUIs. Even the installer is very much a hands on process where you manually mount, chroot and fdisk. But at the same time it has very nice documentation for these processes so even non-uber-geeks can work through the OS.

Re:Gentoo

[yuri benjamin]

I also wouldn't use it on a slow computer as compiling source code can take awhile.

1) d/l the source onto fastbox.
2) Compile on fastbox with the compile flags set for slowbox, so it produces binaries optimised for slowbox.
3) Transfer binaries to slowbox.
4) Prof^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Talk is cheap

[Kiwi]

I've reverse engineered decompression algorithms far more difficult than SVQ3's decoder.

Talk is cheap. Show us the code.

The devil is in the details. In other words, it is easy to say something is easy until you have done it.

If you have reversed-engineered a significant audio or video codec, I will retract my position and be suitably impressed.

And, yes, I do see you code at http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/packers.php3, but there isn't an audio nor video codec to be seen. It all looks like LZW variants; lossy compression (DCTs, wavelets, and what not) is a completely different kettle of fish.

- Sam

Re:Talk is cheap

[Rares Marian]

Audio compression is lossy. DCT, wavelets, and psychoacoustics are PART of AUDIO COMPRESSION!

Re:Talk is cheap

[rakslice]

Erm... So?

My Daily Updater :)

[Anonymous Coward]

#!/bin/bash
# Begin /tmp/mplayer

export CFLAGS="-O2 -w -pipe -march=athlon-xp -mcpu=athlon-xp"

export CVSROOT=":pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ mplayer"
cvs -z3 checkout main

export CVSROOT=":pserver:anonymous@cvs.ffmpeg.sourceforge .net:/cvsroot/ffmpeg"
cvs -z3 checkout ffmpeg

rm -rf main/libavcodec
mv ffmpeg/libavcodec main
rm -rf ffmpeg
cd main

./configure --prefix=/usr \
--enable-new-conf \
--enable-menu \
--with-reallibdir=/usr/lib/rp9

make && make install

exit 0
# End /tmp/mplayer
bash-2.05b$

Be ignorant; everyone's doing it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The simple fact is... ...that there are freeloaders aplenty. More power to them. I really have absolutely no problem with that. As long as they don't bite the hand that feeds them. That is truly stupid.

LICENCE?

[Anonymous Coward]

In one day we've got a report, a misspelled word, and a bunch of pretty poorly selected articles. SNAFU.

Re:please mod this +8 LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not. Please see http://slashdot.org/~b0r1s/ for details. (Comment titled: "Re:Build it, the (apps) will come?").

Re:Build it, the (apps) will come? Thursday January 23, @12:13AM Replies:8 Score:6, Insightful .

CVS update???

[TeknoHog]

When you've checked out the sources once, it's enough to do "cvs -z3 update -dP" in the ffmpeg and MPlayer directories. It will only fetch the files that have been updated since last time. BTW I'm using distcc to split the compilation work between my two machines.

Re:CVS update???

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this. But I have good bandwidth and don't care to re-checkout all the time from scratch. It's a tiny module anyways. I do update GNOME and KDE but not such little things.

Gentoo

[Helmholtz]

This kind of ranting, raving, finger-pointing, and concept that rules should be made with the intention to be used as clubs is the _exact_ reason I quit frequenting #debian. This has also played a role in my migration of almost all my boxes to Gentoo. Software runs faster, the atmosphere in #gentoo and on the mailing lists is much more amicable, and I think they have a better distribution concept.

Of course, mplayer works quite well with gentoo ... after all, it gets compiled when you emerge mplayer.

Licensing?

[Jeff Kelly]

I would consider the minor GPL violations the least of mplayers problems. What about the numerous video and audio formats they use without proper licensing?

Even if everything is reverse engineered then it would only save them from infringing on copyright but they would still have to pay the technology owners which means that at least mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 are out of the question ($ 2,50 per copy licensing fees). The same holds for several other formats which are not covered under a non commercial license.

I might get something wrong here but why can mplayer (and xine for that matter) use mpeg-1/2 divx, mp3 vivo and several other formats (including wma/wmv) without paying royalties to the respective copyright and patent holders and why doesn't anybody care about this?

May somebody please enlighten me about this issue?

Regards

Jeff

Re:Licensing?

[Bremen24601]

I think it has something to do with the fact that MPlayer is based in Hungary :0) Of course if any developers live in the US, or other countries with similiar laws, I'd assume they could be in legal trouble... ask a lawyer :0)

Re:Licensing?

[TeknoHog]

It sounds quite similar to DVD Jon's case. If we can't legally watch Quicktime on Linux, we'll try and find a way around. Moreover, some people think it's a stupid idea to charge for the right to view _media that you rightfully own_. For instance, if you can read books for free (because you've once learned the language), why could you not "learn to read mpeg2" as well?

Re:Licensing?

[evilviper]

What about the numerous video and audio formats they use without proper licensing?

You will notice the ".hu" at the end of their URL. That tends to mean that US laws don't apply to them.

why can mplayer (and xine for that matter) use mpeg-1/2 divx, mp3 vivo and several other formats (including wma/wmv) without paying royalties to the respective copyright and patent holders

Well, besides their jurisdiction problem, there is also the matter of lawyer's fees. Take a look at the history of software patents... Unisys didn't give a damn about LZW until they noticed that there was critical mass, and people wouldn't be able to completely stop using LZW even if they wanted to. The same goes for the MP3 patents. They don't give a damn until there are large pockets from which they can pick.

The GPL doesn't prevent that...

[Kjella]

I can use GPL'd software to run say, a PDA. Don't you think you can make a profit of that? Particularly if they add some kind of code signing to make sure only programs approved by the PDA producer can run. The code still remains open, but they can still turn a profit from it...

Kjella

Real men build from source

[quantum bit]

License prohibits binary distribution? Barely legal codecs that Debian can't distribute? No problem!

cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer
make install

Yay BSD!

Wrong, wrong, wrongitty-wrong.

[pla]

How fucking weird it is that you figure the 'default' state for copyrighted material is to allow copying.

Nice strawman, but I did not claim what you argue against. I claimed the the default *MINDSET* of people includes arbitrary copying of material, regardless of legal limitations on that copying. Not that the material itself (or rather, its owners, since "content", as an inanimate thing, can't allow or disallow anything) allows copying by default.


Actually, if MPlayer is in violation of the GPL, then they don't have the right to distribute.

False. MPlayer can use whatever license terms they want. If that means "GPL sans section 6", they have every right to do so, the inconvenience of that choice falling on those who want to USE or DISTRIBUTE such material, not the authors themselves. I think you may have misphrased your statement that I quoted, however, since the rest of your comment implies exactly the opposite of what you actually said in the above quote. In which case, I would *legally* agree with you, IF they had also excluded the "modification and free redistribution" portions of the GPL. However, not having disallowed that, I don't see the MPlayer authors as having a choice in the matter. They chose to use a license not entirely compatible with their intent, they now have to live with the consequences of that choice, whether they "want" to or not. They can change the terms for *future* releases, but for what they've done up to now, they don't have a lot of options to repair the damage.


For example, if Martha Stewart was to write up some code and release it under the GPL, and then Pamela Anderson took that code and added to it and released the result with additional restrictions, *you* do not have any rights to that new code.

Bad example. I would indeed have the rights to that code granted by the GPL, because Pam *didn't* have the right to use a *MORE* restrictive license in the first (second?) place.


You don't get the code, you don't get money, you don't get a blowjob, you get nothing.

Wrong again. I don't get money, or a BJ, or any other considerations or damages, but I *DO* get the code. The GPL exists to prevent EXACTLY the situation you describe - someone using GPL'd code to create a non-GPL'd result. Someone can make as many GPL'd derivatives of already-GPL'd code as they want, but they can't just take the source and close it.


But it cannot forcibly make someone release code that they own the copyright on, regardless of whether it's a derivative.

True. But by *starting* from GPL'd code, the derivative work DOESN'T own the copyright. No one forced the author of the derivative to start with GPL'd code. They made the choice all by themselves, and byt the terms of the GPL, that choice includes releasing that derivative under the GPL (or not releasing it at all).


God it's fucking amazing how stupid people can be.

I agree with that completely. You make an excellent example. With all the possible valid responses you could have made to my post, you chose an inarticulate (obscenity in moderation makes a point - obscenity for lack of a well-thought-out turn of phrase makes you look like an idiot) one, materially false in every important point.


The one situation in which you would seem not *quite* so wrong involves MPlayer's use of copyrighted 3rd-party binary modules (such as using the Sorensen codec). However, you did not mention anything about that, so I will presume you meant something completely different (and wrong). This would read more like "If Martha released a closed commercial program, Pam couldn't take it and release a derivative GPL version". In that case, no, I would have no rights to it, because Pam had no rights to GPL it in the first place.

Even then, this becomes somewhat sticky in the case of MPlayer, *precisely* because of their licensing terms - Similar to how XVid gets around MPEG-4 licensing, since they don't actually produce an MPEG-4 (binary) implementation, only "source code for research". For a more familiar real-world analogy, a CD player program "uses" copyrighted material to which it has no rights whatsoever. Without that copyrighted material, a CD player seems completely, utterly useless. Yet, would you claim that a CD player program, GPL'd or not,violates some third-party's copyrights?

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrongitty-wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

False. MPlayer can use whatever license terms they want. If that means "GPL sans section 6", they have every right to do so, the inconvenience of that choice falling on those who want to USE or DISTRIBUTE such material, not the authors themselves.

Sure, everybody has the right to select the terms for their own code. However MPlayer links with and is distributed with code that is GPL-ed. Thus in order to use that code, they need to get either a seperate license, or follow the terms of the GPL. If they choose not to follow the terms fo the GPL then they don't have the right to distribute the code that is GPLed that they currently distribute.

I was arguing against the premise/question you asked at the end of your comment:

If the MPlayer license complies with the GPL in all regards *except* allowing binary distribution, that means the authors cannot stop me from modifying and re-releasing it under GPL-or-better terms. So why hasn't Debian done exactly that? "Nope, not MPlayer, we changed int main(int argc, char **argv) to int main(int argc, char *argv[]), much more aesthetically pleasing, and released it as DPlayer under pure GPL terms"?. Seems that the GPL allows that...

They, under absolutely no circumstance are required to make their own code GPL. However if they want to incorporate code that is GPLed, then they must follow the GPL's terms of distribution, etc. However if they release code that is derivative of GPLed code and don't release the whole as a GPLed work, nobody, anywhere has the right to say "well they included GPLed code in there, so they have to give it all up under the terms of the GPL." They don't. They have the choice of not distributing a derivative work. And if the original copyright holder chooses to do so, that person can pursue them through the legal system. However no third party has any rights regarding GPL violations, etc.

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrongitty-wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong again. I don't get money, or a BJ, or any other considerations or damages, but I *DO* get the code.

No you don't. You don't get anything. Person A writes program X and releases it under the the GPL. Person B takes program X, adds to it and releases program Y under the BobLicense (which for the sake of argument is not compatible with the GPL.) So now person B is in violation of the license that person A has chosen for program X. Person A can sue person B and force them to either 1) release their program under the terms of the GPL, or 2) stop distributing the parts of program X that they included in program Y. Person B chooses which of those two options they like. You, as person C (or person A for that matter), do not have any rights to program Y. Person A has stated (via the GPL) that if anyone wants to incorporate program X into their program they must extend the rights given by the GPL to a third party. If person B chooses not to do this, then they are not granted the rights to incorporate program X into their program. They do not automatically loose copyright protection for their own work that they incorporated program X into. They just don't have the legal right to distribute program X or derivatives of program X. That is all. No third party automatically gets a GPL license for program Y. The situation resolves down to the point that person B is distributing a derivative work of program X illegally.

The GPL provides the terms that I may distribute code that is covered by it. Those terms are primarily:

1) source code is available
2) whoever wants can redistribute the code with these same rights
3) whoever wants can incorporate this code into their own programs and redistribute the derivative work if they give these same rights applied to the whole work

If I choose to ignore those restrictions, then I don't have the right to redistribute GPLed code. If I do distribute such code, then the original copyright holder has some legal recourse against me. But no third party has any legal recourse. Why do you think the FSF wants people to assign programs to be included in the the GNU system over to them? It's so they can pursue violations.

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrongitty-wrong.

[Gleef]

Pretty much my understanding, but with one caviat:

If person C has downloaded program Y before person B was slapped with an injunction preventing distribution, my understanding is that nobody has the legal right to go to C's house and reclaim that copy of the code. So, in one sense, C does have the code.

However, the license on Y is null and void, so C can't distribute the code, or do anything outside the bounds of Fair Use; C certainly doesn't have a GPL on Y, only on the original X.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, the above should not be construed as legal advice.

bullshit part 2

[Anonymous Coward]

so I'm going to register just to get karma? I posted my name, thankyouverymuch

I saw the name, you can find mine at the bottom of this page. I looked that person up, and I still would not take their word over the Debian legal team.
you can email me at seth at tautology.org if you want, as well. I'm a real live person with a name.

I'm dead, it's hard to register your preferences when you are dead. Still, I have at least one account so I don't have to press all the buttons to make the page look the way I want it to.

-Abraham Lincoln.

Re:wtf? am i missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because...

Fine with me, but then they shouldn't have used other people's GPL code in their software.

I'm a scientific software developer myself, and I hate the stupid bugreports/trivial questions as much as anybody, but in contrast to the MPlayer developers we have an FAQ where we kindly ask people to recompile if it doesn't work on their platform. Just because somebody is less talented than you doesn't mean you have to bite their head off.

Frankly, if you were to include my code in your package I don't CARE why you don't like to distribute binaries. Either you release it as GPL or you can count on me suing you for copyright infringement.

Not a legal problem, an attitude problem

[billstewart]

The Slashdot article hints that there's a problem involving distribution of binaries, but doesn't point to anything that lets you find it.
The Mplayer home page doesn't explain the problem - it points you at a flame-war on a mailing list, which has couple of postings about "You suck! No, YOU suck! No, YOU suck and your COMPILER is UGLY! Well, YOUR father smells of Elderberrries and your Hovercraft is full of EELS!", and while it's possible that there's some more enlightening content farther down, there's nothing to suggest that there actually will be, or that this flame war will be any more enjoyable than the last 20 years of Usenet flame wars.

The Mplayer info page says that "MPlayer is GPL now. In the past it contained non-GPL code from the OpenDivX project, which did not allow binary redistribution. This has been removed." It doesn't actually appear to have the license, except perhaps in some hunk of code I'm not going to bother downloading now. If they say it's GPL, then they're obviously referring to the GPL, so I can distribute binaries if I want. If they've got other documentation that's more restrictive than this, well, this one's on their web page, though they probably should have provided a link to the GPL themselves.

Re:wtf? am i missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, Arpi doesn't seem to like the idea of "crippled" binary releases moreso than "no binary release". It seems that in the past, there have been stripped down MPlayer releases and the MPlayer guys get hammered with blame for something not working properly. But really, it isn't as though the MPlayer guys are forcing anyone to download the codec packs. The are seperate tarballs. It makes more sense to just not include MPlayer at, instead of stripping it down and releasing binaries. I think that's what they are trying to get at. Nobody wants a player that plays only one or two file types, even if it is the best, most stable, and fastest player around.

Arpi and the guys are mad coders. That program is fabulous because they've concentrated on making it functional and making it play everything *before* worrying about trivial details like its suckass GUI. And even the MPlayer developers will probably admit that the GUI sucks.

Binaries of Linux media players are probably a dumb idea anyways. You are probably going to have to dig into "unfamiliar territory" by having to choose sound and video output drivers to get the most optimized playback.

Leave out those codecs. We already got our own!

[Cyno]

All I want is a good quality bug free video player that easily streams xvid ogms with ogg vorbis audio from an SMB, NFS or ssh connection. Once the product is polished and stable, then we can worry about wmv and quicktime plugins and legal issues.

Re:Dear Fascist (Read "Bush") Sympathizer:

[ScottKin]

I'd much rather have a President that was concerned about National Security, AIDS & the Economy than one who was thinking about the next time he could have a meeting with that "aide" or how he was going to hide that little windfall from that Condo deal - not to mention the deal with the Chinese where we sold them Top Secret missile design info. Nothing like selling-out your country when you're the (supposed) leader of that country - but since he was the left-wing/Liberal/Democraticn Party's "man", they'll look the other way just to get into power and do to the country what Monica did to "Slick Willie".

Get some perspective, people!!!

ScottKin

Here's a match

[DrSkwid]

The stability of Debian and the ease of apt-get just can't be matched.

Oh yes it can!

8)

I mix Licenses and put the resulting code on Kazaa

[Anonymous Coward]

I say fsck the man. fsck the GPL. Information wants to be free.

fsck copyrights, fsck patents, fsck software licenses, fsck GPL, fsck GNU.
They are all ok until they prevent innovation.

I propose a new "agreement". An agreement that uses the GPL "system", but only as a means to a final goal of true freedom. I call the "agreement" GFA - General Free Agreement. One where the users can use the code under the GPL, but only if they agree to not get into bullshit arguments about mixing code/licences.

All code is good code. GPL, BSD, stuff you stole from a monopoly company. Mix it all up to create cool shit. Put it on Kazza!!!

Re:Dear Fascist (Read "Bush") Sympathizer:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, some Americans feel that way too, not just people in Usia.

not the first time

[nf]

the root of it all is that the mplayer team seems to want to protect their "brand name" in the same way that djb held a grip on qmail et all with his weirdo license (or lack thereof). they seem quite proud of mplayer's abilities and performance and the inclusion of a "crippled" mplayer in debian would certainly defy that. my suggestion was to create an mplayer debian package that can only play .au, just to piss them off. you'll notice there is no qmail/djbdns in debian or OpenBSD for similar reasons. (see http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#djb and http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archive/openbsd- ports/200108/msg00461.htmlfor further clarification). instead of wacky configuration file pathnames and installation locations, the mplayer group seems convinced that their system for providing one binary for multiple sub-architectures is right.

but unlike djb, the mplayer group utilizes the standard GPL license (probably because they were too lazy to write their own crazy license) and seems to think they can utilize the GPL as a shield for protection of their illegal software.

in short, this isn't the first case of killer-app type software that is written by immature and/or wacky authors with questionable licensing terms (bitchx, qmail/djbdns, glftpd, vision-x, etc.)

if anything, their messages to debian-devel and the retalliatory flames are certainly entertaining reading.

Re:not the first time

[dsb3]

> you'll notice there is no qmail/djbdns in debian or OpenBSD for similar reasons.

$ apt-cache search djbdns
djbdns-installer - Source only package for building djbdns

Binary packages aren't distributable, but source-only packages with a post-download compile/install stage are legit.

A similar thing is available for Pine to work around similar license restrictions.

Re:wtf? am i missing something?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

>So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because...

Fine with me, but then they shouldn't have used other people's GPL code in their software.

(Sigh)...
Again, as far as *I* can tell, since the last of the non-GPL-able code was replaced in MPlayer, there have been NO efforts to STOP distribution of binaries. There's a BIG difference between "don't WANT binaries being distributed" and "FORBID binaries to be distributed"...

At ONE TIME MPlayer had a "no binary distribution clause" BECAUSE OF the non-GPL-able code that it still contained at the time. Evidently, people are still hung up on the fact that this GPL-incompatible clause existed at one time, even though it no longer does. People are mis-interpreting the opposition to binary distributions of MPlayer for TECHNICAL reasons as being an outright PROHIBITION on binary distribution for LICENSING reasons as a result...

something better?

[demmer]

before i would bann something from my distribution i would look for something equally good first. i used mplayer in my notebook to play all kinds of videos using the framebuffer device and tv out... what other "multimedia" player can do that with all kinds of video formats?

I used to have RH but now I use MDK...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I dont give a damn about the most important things (FOR ME) in the system comming precompiled.

I dont need to wait for a team to stress test my Kernel, desktop, database server, http server, IDS, compiler, and non-gpl (read pirate) pics porn or software (inlcuding MS one) that I want to have installed or copied on my box.

I Compile my kernel, apache, mysql, snort, KDE from cvs (HEAD) and any other package that i have interest on including compilers, and of course MPlayer !! The only thing I cannot compile, but still prirate it, is vmware, because I haven found the source code, but still have it working with my new 2.4.21-pre3 (what not pre4 ??) kernel :-)

I dont quite get all that binary things, and distribution thing.

I just see my distro as an easy way to install a base system, but all the sexy things I get them on the most convenient way for me, compile it :-), rpm sucks the big time just as any other package system. Use it conveniently (i.e. inversely proportionally to your knlowledge)

G

Erm...

[Bert64]

But not all of the code in MPlayer is based on other peoples gpl code, much of it is written by the mplayer team themselves... and any binary distribution of mplayer would require this code in order to function, so surely theyre well within their rights to request that people dont distribute binaries of THEIR code... I doubt they would complain if you built object files of the gpl`d code they reused from other projects, ofcourse on their own you wouldn`t have a very usefull program...

A hefty Flamewar is putting it lightly.

[/dev/trash]

Man, some of those emails are pretty intense. So far though I seem to be siding with the Debian view of things. Although if Xine is violating the gpl it should be gone as well.

Reengineering CODECs: Not Good!!!!

[anonymous cupboard]

I still have Windows on my machine, I have media player. Why can't I use those DLLs from another operating system?

Apple is on quicksand if they want to stop you calling the provided DLLs directly. Note that no code modification is taking place so what is the problem? If Apple didn't want you to do this, they could give you a staticly linked binary.

Your last point shows that really don't understand. If I take a Codec and reverse engineer it to produce a copy, I'm on difficult ground (unless I split the reverse engineering from the programming as with the original Phoenix BIOS) and employ a team of lawyers. Invoking a DLL is quite safe because I'm using the original code. In my particular situation, I haven't even removed Windows, so neither Micrsoft nor Apple can complain.

MPlayer is far from perfect, but its flexibility (given a rebuild or two), means that it, alone of all my media players copes with every video format I throw at it. If I want DVD menus, ok I go to Ogle. For the rest, I use MPlayer.

Re:Reengineering CODECs: Not Good!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the DMCA makes this more legal. Technically. It's never been tested, of course.

Heh heh. :)

[digital photo]

*LOL*

Not touching this one. :) (But I agree that stability and ease of apt-get is not limited to Debian alone. ^_-)

Cool! Thanks! :)

[digital photo]

Wow.. sounds pretty straightforward.

I was at a shop just this last weekend and picked up a box for Debian(about $6). I was going to get it setup on one of my three boxes.

Currently, I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 running the "Pebbel" distro based on Debian(apt-get there has been a great help!). 2 (GNU)Linux systems running Suse. And one WinXPpro system I'm hoping to migrate off of and to Debian or Gentoo Linux.

Since I've already got the Debian disks, guess I'll give that a go. :)

Thanks alot! Very encouraging to hear more (GNU)Linux in the classroom!

So... Gentoo source code...

[digital photo]

Ah... so Gentoo downloads the source code and automagically compiles it...

Cool. :)

Definitely something to test out. :)

Thanks for the very informative info!

So, no MPlayer in Debian.

[soccerisgod]

After reading a good portion of the posts of that thread, I'd say debian should just not include an MPlayer package for the following reason: They fear they could be sued for including a package with questionable legality and their only idea how to solve this problem is to remove everything they think might set of someone. Stuff like libavcodec.

However, this would cripple the program beyond useless and probably make Debian users think it was totally uncapable a program. I say, if you can't include a player like this in it's full glory, don't. Maybe they could provide some information to the user where to get MPlayer? But throwing it in the same toilet they threw Xine in (ie, leaving out everything that might make it useful), that can't be the answer...

Shut the fuck up lamer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking mushmouth if you got something to complain, fix it yourself motherfucker! Go back to Windows fucking LAMER!

y, don't rock the boat ;)

[DrSkwid]

as a rookie IT admin in a 2 man outfit [where the other guy is sales] it was the FreeBSD ports that attracted me to it (along with the 2 floppy install - the rest comes in on the wire)

But I love the GPL and all it stands for. It has done much good for computing.

When you absolutley have to kill every mother fucker in the room: use Debian.

no wait ...

Do I just take DOS binaries for those

[Anonymous Coward]

....You could do in Europe.
All that you may not bolx in the license is compleatly invalid, since interoperability is one of the rights you are specificly given in europe

programmers have magic powers? WTF?

[nickos]

Eveything was fine until I got to this bit at the end. What's he talking about?

9.10 How to Deal with Organizational Chaos

There are often times of great organizational chaos. These are unsettling to everyone, but perhaps a little less unsettling to the programmer whose personal self-esteem is founded in her capacity rather than in her position. Organizational chaos is a great opportunity for programmers to exercise their magic power. I've saved this for last because it is a deep tribal secret. If you are not a programmer, please stop reading now.

Engineers have the power to create and sustain.

Non-engineers can order people around but in a typical software company can create nothing on their own and only have the power that engineers grant them. They can create and sustain nothing without engineers. This power is proof against almost all the problems associated with organizational mayhem. When you have it you should ignore the chaos completely and carry on as if nothing is happening. You may of course get red, but if that happens you can easily get a new job because of the magic power. More commonly, some stressed-out person who does not have the magic power will come into your cube and tell you to do something stupid. It is best to smile and nod until they go away and then carry on doing what you know is best for the company.

This course of action is the best for you personally, and the best for the company you work for. If you are a leader, tell your people to do the same thing and tell them to ignore what anybody other than yourself tells them,
including your own superiors.

Re:programmers have magic powers? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

whoops, wrong thread!

thanks

[Ender Ryan]

Thank you for the nice injection of sanity :)

I read the followups to your response... and the one guy *STILL* didn't get it! That's even more stupid and annoying considering your post was in response to mine, where I had the excerpt from the MPlayer site explaining that the non-GPL code no longer was included and binary distributions were no longer forbidden! Gaaahh!

This type of thing just makes me want to bang my head into a brick wall, and I think I completely understand the MPlayer developers' frustrations.

*sigh* - even the Debian maintainers are having trouble with this...

mplayer license is GPL

[bongoras]

from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/info.html

License:

MPlayer is GPL now. In the past it contained non-GPL code from the OpenDivX project, which did not allow binary redistribution. This has been removed.

Re:The Project From Hell - french bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

What can you expect...the authors are French. Need we say more? I have been to their country.

Appeals to Authority Hold No Water

[FreeUser]

I think it's more of:

a) The debian-legal people have quite a lot of respect from a lot of people, and a lot of credibility.

This is a classic "appeal to authority" and a well documented logical fallacy. I could use the same flawed argument to point out that his credibility is greater than zero (being a [former] developer of a GNU/Linux distribution), while yours (as a bitter voice from the peanut gallary) carries considerably less weight.

But that would be beside the point. Your credibility starts out precisely even with his, and is enhanced (or lost) based upon the arguments you present. In this particular thread, his arguments are more compelling than your ad homonem attack (another logical fallacy ... you managed to pack two fallacies into a scant three sentences).

b) As it stands, you have ZERO credibility.

He is rational, concise, and correct in his arguments. MPlayer is GPL software, as can be verified by going to the mplayer site, downloading the software, and looking at the license. The GPL allows for binary redistribution, as does an explicit statement on the website from the developers themselves.

Who is more authoritative on the licensing terms of the software, the authors, or those flaming them? I mean, please.

The flamefest engaged on by the Debian-Legal folks was clearly based on outdated information, which apparently none of these "credible" folks bothered to update before engaging in their little spat and opting to remove an important package from their distribution. This is not the action of a group of thoughtful, intelligent people excersizing their intellectual prowess to determine the legality (or lack thereof) of a project, it is a pissing match resulting in a decision derived from personal animosity and spite ... an all to frequent occurance in Debian politics, unfortunately.

As an aside, Gentoo (and the aforementioned Source Mage) both avoid all this nonsense, as they are source based distributions which simply and painlessly compile mplayer (and xine, and any number of other packages) from the most current sources, giving us the best of all possible worlds, sans the politics, flames, and buggy library mismatches. Most folks with a reasonable processor who go to a source based distro never look back.

Re:Appeals to Authority Hold No Water

[JohnFluxx]

I fail to see why "appeal to authority" is a flawed argument.

I would, starting with zero knowledge, expect a professional plumber to have better knowledge about plumbing than bob down the road.

The fact that the mplayer people say that it is fully GPL'ed does not necessarily make it so.

Who would know more about law between some programmers and a legal team? Hmm, let me see...

As for gentoo - it's good to hear they ignore nonsense like licenses. I'll recommend it to my company next time they are looking for the best way to get sued.

You're on the web, look it up

[FreeUser]

I fail to see why "appeal to authority" is a flawed argument.

You obviously have no clue with respect to logic, so allow me to elucidate:

argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority)

The fact that the mplayer people say that it is fully GPL'ed does not necessarily make it so.

It is the authors' code. The authors wrote it, and have chosen to GPL it. They are in a far stronger position to know whether or not they've chosen to GPL their code than any outside observer, no matter how much authority said observer may have in your uninformed eyes.

As for gentoo - it's good to hear they ignore nonsense like licenses. I'll recommend it to my company next time they are looking for the best way to get sued.

You are obviously a troll, a clueless fuck, or both. If you had bothered to do even a modicum of research (such as reading the mplayer license for yourself, or visiting the gentoo website, you would have found that each package is clearly and distinctly linked to the full text of their license, be it GPL, BSD, artistic, proprietary, or what have you, and the absolutely none of the software they distribute is done so without and thorough look at the licensing, and all of it is distributed in accordance to the terms of said licenses.

This isn't rocket science, but it does require a fifth grade reading level and a willingness to excersize it.

As for looking to get sued, slander seems to be the approach to that end which would complement your expressive talents the most.

Re:You're on the web, look it up

[JohnFluxx]

From the url you post:
-----
While sometimes it may be appropriate to cite an authority to
support a point, often it is not. In particular, an appeal to
authority is inappropriate if:
(i) the person is not qualified to have an expert
opinion on the subject,
(ii) experts in the field disagree on this issue.
(iii) the authority was making a joke, drunk, or
otherwise not being serious
-----

I would say the debian-legal team is fairly qualified. I'm not sure point 2 really applies. Point 3 doesn't.

The mplayer authors did not write all the code. That is one of the problems. And even if they did, you can still have problems with patents (again, as in this case) which invalidate the GPL (The GPL is very clear in this case)

You're quick switch to swearing is very akin to the mplayer guys. What's wrong with just discussing this, and then coming to a conclusion?

The inclusion of libavcodec already causes legal problems.

Also your idea of researching the subject by looking at the mplayer license is slightly flawed in that that is what is being called into question.

Have a quick look through the mailing list (although its hard I admit with all the abuse they throw at each other - I hate that).

Also have a look at the other posts in this thread. A lot of them are offtrack, but there are some points in there.

Looking closely at licenses may appear to be anal, and it is a pain in the arse, but it's healthy to do so.

Btw, what exactly was I slandering? The fact that there is arguing on a fairly visible list about the license means companys wouldn't touch it with a barge pole until it is cleared up. Valid or not.

Re:You're on the web, look it up

[FreeUser]

Apologies for flying off the handle. There has been a great deal of nonsense spread about on this thread, and your post (particularly the Gentoo comments) appeared to be more of the same. Your thoughtful response to my reply however indicates that I misjudged your post, your intent, and you. Sorry about that.

(ii) experts in the field disagree on this issue.

Is quite relevant. The Debian clique may have reached a consensus (though it appears even in Debian circiles that consensus is far from uniform), but in the wider arena there is clearly disagreement with their position. The Suse legal team obviously finds the GPLed version of mplayer to be perfectly legal, else they would not include it in their distribution, for example, and their are numerous other qualified opinions at odds with the self-appointed Debian clique as well. Not to say the Debian folks don't do good work ... they generally do, and certainly did on the KDE/QT front when it was an issue, but an appeal to their authority is way off base given the preponderance of other qualified opinions which lean the other way. They are quite fallable (as evidenced by numerous instances of excluding one application on a particular basis while including other applications which run afoul of the very same

Appeals to authority are dangerous even when their is no dissent: consider the view of capitalism in the former Soviet block as an example. No expert in that society held that capitalism would work because of politcal dogma ... even if the entire planet had been communist (and they had developed a democracy to temper communisms excesses the way the capitalist world has done, such that it could function), the appeal that "all the experts recognize that capitalism cannot work" would have been just as erroneous.

An appeal to authority, even when there is little or no dissent, remains a flawed argument. (Texts other than the one google happened to bring up first expand on this point. A logical argument as to the pros and cons of a point can either be made independently of so-called experts opinions, or it can not be made logically. The link I happened to provide unfortunately obfuscates this important point).

Looking closely at licenses may appear to be anal, and it is a pain in the arse, but it's healthy to do so.

Agreed. And I've done so. Mplayer isolates its code from the codec code via an API. Mplayer is clearly legal ... whetner inclunding codec X or codec Y is may be debatable, but the simple solution is to simply compile it (or distribute a binary) without support for the questionable codec. Which the GPL allows for.

As for patents, few countries other than the United States accept or acknowledge software pantents, so the patent issue at most affects only a small subset of the internet, and can be ignored by the wider, more enlightened world. We may not be able to use certain codecs here in the States, but users in China, India, and most of Europe won't have such a limitation, and the GPL will hold there quite well.

Btw, what exactly was I slandering?

The Gentoo comment, while probably not slanderous per se, was certainly off base. They pay very close attention to licenses, and adhere to them rigorously. Which is why when one wants to emerge sun-j2sdk, one must wade through Sun's annoying (though slowly improving) webpage, click on a buch of EULA acceptance buttons, download the tarballs manually, and then run the emerge script (Which of course in turn is why almost no one installs sun's JDK and opts for blackdown or one of the others instead, in which the tarball download is automated, but that is a criticism for another day).

Re:You're on the web, look it up

[JohnFluxx]

Fair enough. I agree with everything you said, and to be honest I don't really care either way. Either way I'll just get it from cvs, get all the illegal codecs, and compile in support for everything. ;)

The mentality I despise

[SpeedBump0619]

From the mailing list discussion:
> A user who can install a working xine package in 3 clicks won't care it runs
> 0.001% slower, if it just works.
A user who wants a movie player to install with 3 clicks can go use windows.

[rant mode engaged]

What is it that makes developers think that ease of installation and use isn't important? Why do you think Windows has done so well?

I've tried most of the major distributions, and I've finally ended up at gentoo. Sure it's a little bit of an uphill battle to get it initially installed, but the packaging system is so nice. One command and xine and all it's dependancies are installed...from sources...optimized for my machine.

Why should I have to do several hours of research trying to figure out how to get some piece of software to run? Shouldn't it just run out of the "box". Why do developers *insist* on foisting all this crap on their end users?

If you are going to distribute something distribute it *well*. If your response (as the distribution maintainer) is "its free so deal" then you shouldn't be making distributions . Either do it right or don't do it...don't do half measures.

Debian's philosophy is not in your way

[Anonymous Coward]

Compile from the source. If you can't do that, ask for help. If you don't want to do that, stop whining. If you don't stop whining, fuck you.

This is why...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I don't use MPlayer. There's rarely a civilized discussion about it, and, as I said before, the developers are about as mature as my 4-year-old niece. I have yet to see any evidence that they aren't socially-retarded self-satisfied jerks. Certainly this thread, and the threads on the Debian lists don't provide such evidence.

Re:I mix Licenses and put the resulting code on Ka

[rodolfo.borges]

CLAP, CLAP, CLAP!! :P
Pleas mod the Mr A.C here up to the SKY!

MPlayer CORE TEAM!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have our (The great BIG MAJORITY of Linux users) 100% support!! THANK YOU for bringing QUALITY video to our Linux desktops! You came with MPlayer when there was nothing - not a single decent mediaplayer for Linux. We will never forget that! That was when a majority of us were finally able to ditch windows.

Do not give a shit about some Debian lamers who just keep on whining because they never get any pussy. Debian folks are generally known to be losers in life..

Good luck with MPlayer! You are the best and you have our support!

gcc 2.96: The Compiler From Hell

[moncyb]

Remember the MPlayer/Red Hat spat? MPlayer's authors refused to even deal with anyone using Red Hat 7.x because they claimed the compiler that shipped with Red Hat was buggy and problematic, when in fact it was their own code that was not up to the level of C compliance that the compiler required.

I'm a little late in this discussion, but I saw this post and had to respond.

You're talking about gcc "version 2.96", aren't you? WTF??? Red Hat deserved to get flamed into the ground for that. They just grabbed experimental gcc code and slapped it in their distro!!! It is just like if someone took the source tree from a 2.5.x Linux kernel, applied some experimental patches to it, and called it version "2.6.0"! If some distro did that, should application / library / kernel developers even consider supporting it? Such a stupid action will cause massive problems. Maybe their code wasn't up to specs, but the gcc "2.96" fiasco did cause countless problems. Maybe you should do some reading about it.