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."
Not VNC, VLC. Videolan Client.
It's a way to stream video content from a server and view it on a client, but as a nice side-effect, it's a DVDCSS-enabled DVD player, and a pretty good one at that. It's not skinnable, it uses your built-in OS widgets, so it's not as ugly as all the other media players. It looks like it belongs on your desktop with all your other apps.
Mplayer seems to have much better DivX/MJPEG/blah/blah support than VLC, however, so you can't just go whacking mplayer from your HDD. Sorry.
fifth sigma, inc.
(I'd link to The Encyclopedia of Arda, but their servers have been bitchslapped since The Two Towers came out, and their site is slower than hell.)
woo+! I finally won!!
-
COMMAND? 5
TORPEDO COURSE (IN DEGREES)? 18.43
TRANSLATES TO 2.57778
TRACK: 7 - 7 6 - 8 5 - 8
KLINGON DESTROYED!
IT IS STARDATE 3457
THE FEDERATION HAS BEEN SAVED!
YOU ARE PROMOTED TO ADMIRAL
36 KLINGONS IN 36 YEARS. RATING= 1000
TRY AGAIN?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
you're a moron.
the complaint is not that binaries are not distributed. the problem is the the mplayer developers have licensed their code under the gpl AND said that people are NOT ALLOWED to distribute binaries. the gpl does not allow that kind of restriction.
what's the point of distributing your code under a license if you're going to ignore it. when i write code i write what i mean, otherwise it doesn't work right. shouldn't the same logic apply to a license?
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
I'd much rather have a President that was concerned about National Security, AIDS & the Economy than one who was thinking about the next time he could have a meeting with that "aide" or how he was going to hide that little windfall from that Condo deal - not to mention the deal with the Chinese where we sold them Top Secret missile design info. Nothing like selling-out your country when you're the (supposed) leader of that country - but since he was the left-wing/Liberal/Democraticn Party's "man", they'll look the other way just to get into power and do to the country what Monica did to "Slick Willie".
Get some perspective, people!!!
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!