Re: mplayer, the time has come
On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 10:08:42PM +0100, Sebastien NOEL wrote:
> * You removed libmpdvdkit2/ because US laws suck.
> Why don't you remove also libfaad2/ which is full of patents problems ?
> (according to /usr/share/doc/ffmpeg/patents.txt.gz)
I hope that isn't a file with descriptions of patents--anyone who reads
such a thing would risk increased patent liability. I'd rather not look
for myself to find out, though.
That said, are the patents supposedly affecting libfaad2 actively being
enforced? Debian's general policy on software patents is to ignore ones
which aren't, since that's the only policy that allows anyone to do
anything at all.
> * Why the "--disable-mencoder" in debian/rules ?
>
> * Why the "--disable-aa" ?
> Ok caca is better than aa but it's not enabled either.
libaa, the ASCII art library? I'd hope that'd be disabled in the normal
build. It's a useless novelty; I certainly wouldn't want to have to
install it to get a video player. (Of course, if it can bind dynamically
at runtime, that's not an issue; I don't know if it does that.)
> (Maybe it's time to resurrect non-us)
I don't know how many times this can be said: non-us is *not a solution*
to patents affecting the US, and never has been. AFAIK, non-us was an
archive that was uploaded to from outside the US, but could be freely and
legally used from inside the US--not an archive which was completely off-
limits to the US.
--
Glenn Maynard
Reply to: