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Kiss Technology Counters MPlayer GPL Arguments
Snaller writes "Recently, MPlayer claimed that KISS Technology were violating the GPL by using parts of their MPlayer movie playback code in proprietary software. Now The Danish National Radio has interviewed the managing director of Kiss Technology, Peter Wilmar Christensen. He denies all claims of wrongdoing and suggests that if the pieces of code are the same, perhaps they were leaked from Kiss Technology and were then used by the Mplayer group. He also adds that the GPL is a weak license which has never been tested in court. Gabucino from the Mplayer team is furious, and accuses the director of outright lying."
The reason GPL has never been tested in court is that there haven't been any solid violations of the licence and the fact that it is so clear (the GPL that is...). The only grey area is 'derivative work' which most certainly includes blatently ripping off a chunk of code.
Well, never let it be said that Americans are the only people to behave in shitty corporate self-interested ways.
Such dishonesty is painfully pathological.
... i'm really eager to see what is going to happen when the GPL goes to court.
To me, it's seems that with wider commercialization of GPLed technology, it becomes more important to have solid foundation to stop once and for all corporate greed and FUD.
Neither scenario paints a pretty picture of Kiss Technology. Are they a publically traded company?
ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
And once again someone (KISS, not parent poster) needs to understand that if the GPL isn't valid, they have absolutely no rights to use code copyrighted by the various authors of the Mplayer code.
Could someone who understands the language take a look at the pre-translated version of:
We doesn't use MPlayer, we use our own player, a player like we know from Real Player, Microsoft Media Player is the application used to display movies. It is a fundamental thing for our player, because it's what we are known for, being able to play a wide range of different formats.
And tell us weather thats actually what this guy said, or if he actually knows what any of this is about? What the hell is he saying? Is he claiming they are using Windows Media player on Linux? Or just that they have a program that functions similar to Real or WMP?
You mean, whether Kiss implimented MPlayer's unique, never seen in the outside world, never used in a video file, subtitle format called MPsub, all at once, or over time?
But why they were even looking to see how KISS's stuff worked is a bit curious.
Because, when you develop open source software, and suddenly some closed source company suddenly 'develops' software for their set top boxes that has very similar features to your open source software, you should check using simple tools (like strings) to see if anything matches. Its not hard to look for certain strings, and you certainly not violating any laws by doing it.
You aren't reverse engineering the software.
Open Source developers have every right to protect their projects.
What, you don't think Microsoft, and every other closed source software developer does this to products which are very similar to theirs?
How else are you supposed to discover when someone steals your work?
Brielle
One of the first things I'd say reading this is that his reaction looks a lot like several other vendors I dealt with whose CEO simply could not believe that either their employees or their subcontractors would steal code.
Some of the confusion also comes from the speaker. If the translation is accurate the speaker asks
"As he said, there are no big economical options for dragging the case to court. Instead they hope that the Open Source community will put so much pressure on Kiss Techonology that they will be forced to release all its software."
The speaker doesn't say anything about software stolen by employees or contractors, or software in dispute, just about "all software". So the reply is that KISS won't release their player app - which the company guy clearly doesn't think contains mplayer code so he doesn't have to release.
At that point he's already denied stealing any code, but confirmed he is having the matter checked.
Now it may be that code was stolen and he doesn't know about it. It may be it was stolen and he systematically was involved. I find the latter hard to believe - if it had been done by someone smart and with foreplanning they would a) have an instant cover story b) done the hiding job a lot better.
So the way I read this it says
"We havent copied anything but we will check"
"We wont be releasing all our code, including our proprietary stuff containing only our code"
"We do release all the open source stuff"
"We have fixed minor errors in the past"
"You are picking on the wrong people"
Put that way it's not quite the same as the mplayer view. Lets just see how the evidence pans out. If the KISS guys find someone stole code then we will see how they handle it. If the mplayer guys are right it won't be too long before the KISS folks will be apologising.
Alan
BTW: Larg e scale commercial copyright violation in parts of the EU (Denmark I believe included) is a violation of criminal not just civil law.
If we continue to buy these players while this issue remains unresolved, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.
On the other hand, this guy sounds like a typical suit, who doesn't really know how his product gets made and whose main job is to pump it. Somebody else posted that he was once heard bragging about the "2 million lines of code" that went into his product. That's exactly the type of dumb, meaningless puffery you can expect from somebody who really doesn't understand what he's selling at a fundamental level.
He has said that KiSS is looking into the problem. If they discover that their firmware contains open source code in violation of its license, then KiSS should immediately issue a firmware update that removes that code, for good or ill as far as product performance goes. (I'm assuming here that they aren't going to relent on their stance that they cannot, under any circumstances, open their code.)
If they find that they really didn't use MPlayer's code, then I guess what they need to do is show their source code to a representative of MPlayer under strict NDA, such that the MPlayer people can be convinced. Would that solve MPlayer's problem, or would they be unwilling to sign an NDA for this purpose?
Still, this whole "we can't open the code" thing is a little silly. KiSS should at least be considering the possibility of opening their source code at this juncture. They're already beginning to face competition in the form of MPEG-4 enabled DVD players from Korea, Taiwan etc. These things are going to beat them on price, guaranteed. Meanwhile, domestic companies like Linksys have announced similar products for the U.S. market, and I can't see how Sony or Panasonic can be too far behind. Any of the established consumer electronics companies is easily going to shut these guys out of the retail channel for good, just on brand recognition alone.
If they open their source, they open up the possibility of "hacked" variants of their player, sure. But what's to lose?
- Nobody says they have to support a hacked version of their firmware, or even support the player at all once the end user flashes a hacked version.
- By opening their source, they gain extra goodwill and patronage from their core market (geeks)
- Closed source isn't going to prevent anyone from emulating their features. We're already seeing it happen. Who cares how 1337 they are when $50 Korean hardware does the same thing?
- It's unlikely that their firmware is going to be binary compatible with another manufacturer's hardware. In other words, you couldn't download a KiSS firmware and run it on a Taiwanese player unless it was hardware compatible, and I assume the hardware design could still be protected by various intellectual property laws. So open KiSS firmware helps to sell closed KiSS hardware.
- What the hell? Open the source, use all the MPlayer code you want, save on R&D!
Right now, I really could not in good conscience buy a KiSS product. If they opened their source tomorrow, I'd probably be jonesing for one even twice as hard as before.Breakfast served all day!
If you lose the court case and the GPL is upheld then you have to either withdraw the product and/or release all of the source code.
If you win the courte case and the GPL is found to be unenforcable then standard copyright takes over. In which case you've distributed copyrighted code without a valid licence and you'll get sued for damages. This outcome is the less likely of the two and would be challanged by every software company in the world (as it would probably make pretty much all software licences uneforcable).
So if you challenge the GPL in court you have the possible outcomes of loosing or loosing worse. Not a really appealing set of options that.
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