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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.
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.
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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!
:(
r /)
;)
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....
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