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

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.