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MPlayer Alleges KISS Technology Violating GPL
bfree writes "Not for the first time, the people at MPlayer think they have found their code being distributed binary only, this time in at least one of KISS Techologies products. In their traditional quiet style the full story is now the first piece of news on their homepage including string comparisons between the player ROM and MPlayer. The 'evidence' presented relates to subtitle identification, where the KISS ROM includes the same list, in order, of subtitle formats as MPlayer (including their own format mpsub) and MPlayer's patterns for each of the formats are also there identically."
Mplayer is one of those apps I just can't live without on my machine. It handles just about anything and everything that I've thrown at it. I use it as my default mp3/movie player. And Quicktime movies are not a problem for Linux anymore.
/home/sgant/music/playlist -shuffle" and I've got hours and hours of back to back music. When I want something a little more structured, I have different playlists.
I quickly made a list of all of my 10+ gigs of mp3/m4a files just using find and grep...touched it up a bit in vim and then use "aterm -e mplayer -playlist
Yeah, I probably could do this with xmms...but why?
Give Mplayer it's due. It's a fine piece of software and they deserve all the recognition they get.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
unauthorised distribution maybe, hacked no.
.wma), real (.rm, .ra) and an apple (if they played hardball with sorensen) for quicktime around just to see the videos that are released on the net today ? i dont care about some eulas i havent read if i can watch these on a system that doesnt connect to the net everytime i play a video.
ffmpeg is the replacement for all divx codecs based on the hacked microsoft dlls so thats fine.
and on the distribution bit, did it ever occur to you that you would have to keep a windows box for windows media (.avi,
From Mplayers homepage: Kiss Technology failed to answer our inquiry for their source files (which they are obligated to provide), so this news entry is posted.
Start reading here
groklawThe Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
How long until someones acknowledgement is denied and work is stolen by a large company who can hide behind the DMCA? An Open Source project could be "appropriated" by Sony or Microsoft who then releases it as their own project. If the source is unavailable, could you determine the origin deffinatively without reverse engineering?
Could this be true, or am I missinterrupting the DMCA (shudder, I hate that thing)?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
They are using the subtitle stuff to identify that it's their code. I doubt anyone else uses MPlayer's subtitle format, so if MPSub is in there, then it probably came from MPlayer. The subtitle format names are also listed in the same order as MPlayer. These two make it probably more than just a coincidence.
We'll just have to see what KISS says about this. If they release the source, it's probably all good (at least it has been for the FSF in the past)
While that's unfortunate for you, the end customer, it's just too bad. If they're not playing by the rules and they're stealing peoples' code, then the problem is that they were crooks, not that they used free software. Wouldn't be much different from Microsoft stealing Sun code.
Perhaps it's a dawning age when businesses will be afraid to use proprietary software for fear that the company integrated GPL'ed source into their binaries without giving poper credit and/or providing the sources? Imagine, all the manadrones going from "Open Source is untrustworthy, we might get sued" or other such nonsense to "Proprietary systems are untrustworthy, they might get sued and we'd lose support".
Ahhhh.... sweet sweet vindication... maybe.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
So, you are saying we should tolerate GPL copyright violations so that you can get updates to your ROMs from sleazy companies? I don't think so. As long as software copyrights are the law of the land, GNU has the same rights to enforce them as everybody else.
If KISS doesn't want to deal with the GPL, they can always license Windows XP/Embedded for their players and you can pay for it. And you can bet that Microsoft will enforce their licenses.
The FSF opposes on principle most licensing schemes other than the GPL (and legally equivalent variations). They don't wan't dual-licensed products (a la MySQL), etc. You are correct that as a result many developers don't like working on GNU projects. But quite a few do - the FSF is largely about a revolution in how software is licensed in general. In the FSF's vision of the world, there is no such thing as closed-source software. The way they propose to create this new world is by making GPL-based software which is better than anything offered in closed-source.
The FSF is definitely about activism. Not all programmers are activists, but the FSF believes that the GPL gives them an edge that no proprietary development firm can beat - the fact that even if only a minority of GPL software users give back, they still receive more than proprietary vendors do from their community.
I'm not bashing those who disagree with the FSF - as I said the FSF is definitely an activist group. But they obviously have been successful despite their requirements regarding copyright assignment. GCC is probably the most widely used compiler there is...