In other words, the fastest way to get legal issues with mplayer clarified
would be for someone who cared specifically about getting mplayer into
Debian putting together a list of the specific questions that need to be
resolved before Debian can take the package, and then go to upstream
(probably doing research in the mailing list first) and develop answers to
those questions. Unfortunately, the hard part in the past has been
getting clarity on that first point. It's not at all clear to me that
anyone really *knows* what issues need to be resolved before Debian can
take the package. You'd probably have to do something like put together a
list of the questions that you think need to be resolved and then see if
one of the ftp-masters would be willing to read that over and see if it
includes everything they were concerned about.