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Kiss Technology Counters MPlayer GPL Arguments

Posted by simoniker on from the kiss-off dept.

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."

3 of 634 comments (clear)

  1. Cebit 2003 by -unta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I met this guy at Cebit last year - and he certainly seemed VERY pleased with himself. He was going on about how the player used "2 million lines of code". I wonder how many of those 2 million came from the MPlayer CVS server? ]-[

  2. what he's really saying by jtilak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    By saying "if parts of the code are similar maybe MPlayer stole our code" he is basically admitting that someone stole from someone.

    then he says...
    The GPL is a weak license and hasn't been tested in court. What is the point of making this comment if he feels that MPlayer stole from them? What he is really saying is "What are you going to do about it?"

  3. Easter eggs (was Re:GPL == strong ) by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think the main reason that the GPL has never been tested in courst is because violations are very difficult to prove.

    Which is why you should put at least one obscure easter egg in the source, which is hard to find on casual inspection, but easy to trigger if you know how.

    Imagine the blushing faces of KISS when Gabucino triggers an easter egg in the KISS player's subtitle code. Now who stole what from who again?

    My memory is a little vague, but I do remember some incident where a case was one by a company because one of the programmers triggered an easter egg in the defendant's code, which blatantly showed that the defendant _had_ been stealing code. Can someone who has better recollection than me refresh my memory?