Re: Software that can't be packaged

[Dariush Pietrzak <eyck@forumakad.pl>]

> in the last couple of days.
> It's even mentioned in the last Debian Weekly News
Yeah! Great that you mention this - because DWN says that it's source of information is the page I've got problem with here.
 And none of them contain any usefull information, only statement 'license and patent issues'. Which is not very helpfull, is it?
 And the only note about 'patent issues' I found, is that some person "heard"
that probably mplayer "probably" contained some kind of encoding capability, 
and he doesen't know exactly, since he haven't seen the source or mplayer itself for like years.

It is not easy to understand the situation when you're faced with statements like this.
 For example - there was possibility to use 'opendivx encoder' as video output
with mplayer, but this was just a toy. Now mplayer developers created working
mpeg4 encoded, called 'mencoder', which uses whole decoding capabilities and source of mplayer. This of course has patent issues - first it encodes mpeg, and it uses lame library to encode sound, which has the same issues with encoding that keep it away from debian ( and at least lame case is a little bit documented on beforementioned page - there is a pointet to archive of discussion here ).
How does that create patent issue for mplayer?
Or maybe this is not the problem, but something else is, 
but how should I know, since noone will state what the problem is.

> From: Tomas Pospisek <tpo2@spin.ch>
> Subject: Re: Software that can't be packaged
> > the mentioned licence, so there is no way for anyone to check if it's still
> > true.
> 
> You can download the package and read the license and then think and
> judge about it by yourself.
IANAL, i don't know what to look at.
It would be so much easier if it was stated what the actual problem is.

regards, 
 Eyck