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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."
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.
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.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
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.