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MPlayer Licence Trouble With A Twist

Posted by timothy on from the life-is-messy-sometimes dept.

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."

5 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. That's why we use "unofficial" debs by Chacham · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    Have you read my journal today?
    1. Re:That's why we use "unofficial" debs by gibber · · Score: 5, Informative
      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

  2. The main gist.... by catch23 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:The main gist.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

  3. Sorry people... by protonman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.