Re: Media players in Debian
On 9/22/06, Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de> wrote:
"Andrew Donnellan" <ajdlinux@gmail.com> writes:
> It would be great if upstream would actually care about legal issues,
> licenses and patents in particular.
Upstream does care for legal issues, and patents in particular. Check
the mplayer development mailing list archive for the last months.
For the last months, as you say. Maybe this is because of the
increased pressure now that software patents are now being enforced
and so on. At the beginning they seemed to just chuck in whatever.
> This is pretty much the only thing stopping Debian from distributing
> it - it may actually be illegal [...]
The problematic parts regarding patents are mostly in ffmpeg, which is
already in debian for some time. There seem to be no problem for debian
redistributing ffmpeg.
I believe it is a patent-stripped ffmpeg.
Other maybe problematic parts are in libdvdcss, which has been strpped
off in the proposed mplayer package.
Honestly, I don't know what problems remain problems regarding mplayer,
but claiming that mplayer upstream did not care about copyright and
patent issue is straight wrong and does only spread FUD. Please help to
improve the situation by mentioning concrete remaining problems.
The Mplayer devs are still not communicating with Debian about the
remaining problems. To rectify them we need to communicate better and
get their input on d-l and d-d.
--
Andrew Donnellan
http://andrewdonnellan.com
http://ajdlinux.blogspot.com
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