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

*GASP*!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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 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: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.

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!