Re: Bug#176267: ITP: mplayer -- Mplayer is a full-featured audioand video player for UN*X like systems
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.
Some 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 why mplayer's
licensing terms were written in that manner. (It's closer to a BSD-style
license in that binaries weren't legal to distribute, but in reverse).
For this reason, one suggestion is that mplayer be placed in Debian via
non-free.
At the same time, because of legal issues with DVD (DeCSS in particular)
and others, it could also be put into non-us. However with that
arrangement, there should be a non-us and a us version of mplayer.
But, I think the best solution is probably create a metapackage that
would download the source (either CVS or the rc/release sources), and
build the binary .deb and install it manually from any arbitrary
directory. I believe that this package could have svgalib, gtk, aalib,
et cetera as recommendations. This probably would alleviate the legal
issues with mplayer and still allow flexibility with most folks.
--
* Derek J Witt <cappicard@cox.net> *
* http://members.cox.net/cappicard/ *
* "...and on the eighth day, God met Bill Gates. But, the *
* Almighty had to return him with postage due. -- Unknown. *
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