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Re: mplayer licenses



On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 08:11:44PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 02:49:27PM +0200, A Mennucc1 wrote:
> > 
> > first of all, thanks a lot for the careful reading
> > 
> > I will incorporate all change that you mention
> > 
> > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:03:56AM +1200, Adam Warner wrote:
> > ....
> > > ***** Could you rewrite this paragraph in a way that is less disparaging
> > > of your fellow developers:
> > 
> > ops 
> > 
> > sorry I didn't mean the following to be in any way disparaging
> > 
> > > ``I personally want to trust that a piece of code stating "GPL" or
> > > "LGPL" is indeed DFSG complaint; if mantainers were so paranoids as to
> 
> It's not paranoia anyway.
> 
> We start from a default position of trusting that upstream developers
> comply with copyright law.
> 
> The upstream developers for mplayer have, several times, stated that
> mplayer was licensed entirely under the GPL, when it simply was not,
> and they had clearly not even tried to check.
> 
> It doesn't matter whether this was intentional or just inept -
> continuing to trust their word on the matter would be foolish.

And throw this one on top of it: consider what it would mean if SCO
weren't lying through their teeth.

Now consider it being some member of the MPAA instead of SCO.

Note that this isn't random hypotheticals - given the scenario, this
is a very real possibility. Which is why we can't afford to trust
them.

Licenses matter. Writing a program and not being careful with the
copyrights and licensing is just like writing a program and not fixing
the bugs. The end result is not useful.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
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