Re: Bug#176267: ITP: mplayer -- Mplayer is a full-featuredaudioand video player
Good afternoon, everyone.
I have noticed this thread about the legality of MPlayer and what not on this and the debian-legal mailing list.
This is my take on this. Much of the codecs supported in mplayer were at one point technically illegal to redistribute (e.g. RealPlayer, Microsoft's Windows Media, QuickTime Sorensen 3.0). Due to this, I can understand how mplayer's licensing terms were written (It's closer to a BSD-style license in that binaries weren't legal to distribute,but in reverse). For this reason, I propose that mplayer be placed in Debian via non-free.
At the same time, because of legal issues with DVD (DeCSS in particular) and other packages, it could also be put into non-us, but I think we should have a non-us and a us version of mplayer. I know that this arrangement is confusing, but if that happens, I propose that mplayer-nodvd(or something similar) and the normal mplayer packages be put into Unstable.
Better yet, why not create a metapackage that can download mplayer sources, and then build the binary .deb file in an arbitary directory (that the user can then manually install). I think this would be the best solution to the legality issues with mplayer. With this arrangement, I believe that aalib, gl,svgalib, dvd, etc. etc. be specified as recommended packages to install for this metapackage.
Just my two-cents worth.
Derek J Witt, cappicard@cox.net
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