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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."
..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.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
- 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.
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Hey men!
:(
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;)
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/mplaye
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....
"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....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
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
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