Include MPlayer in beta?

[William Hooper]

Bryan W. Headley said:
> William Hooper wrote:
>> Botoaca Andrei said:
>>
>>>For any readers of this POST! Read the mplayer site news, you can find
>>>them
>>>at www.mplayerhq.hu ...
>>>Suse added MPlayer to their distro, and they shouldn't have done this
>>> ...
>>>
>>>Read it, it's quite interesting ...
>>
>>
>> Yes, it is interesting that someone that claims to be against software
>> patents is threating to patent their software...
>>
>> "I (A'rpi) want to ask all of those distributions to consider dropping
>> MPlayer packages completely instead of shipping unusable crippled files!
>> Our motto: if you can't do it right, you better don't do it at all!
>> Users
>> can still download the sources and compile them at their own
>> responsibilty. We do know the legal issues well, but since the whole
>> multimedia industry is completely covered by various patents, it's
>> impossible to create a decent free multimedia player without breaking
>> most
>> of these patents. I'm even considering patenting my A-V sync algorithms
>> used in MPlayer G2, to prevent unwanted crippled distribution of the
>> next
>> generation code, but I hope they will recognize their fault in time, and
>> I
>> won't have to do so."
>
> Funny, I read it the other way: "..to prevent unwanted crippled
> distribution..." He doesn't want the package to be associated with the
> crippled functionality certain packagers have visited on mplayer, and is
> mulling what he can do. I appreciate his problem...

a) They obviously don't care about other people's patents, so why should
other people care about his (future) patent?

b) MPlayer is saying it is GPL.  If he decides to try to use patents to
prevent distribution it is no longer GPL (see mp3 discussions).

I feel about MPlayer being "crippled" the same as I feel about people
complaining about KDE being "crippled".  If you don't want people changing
your program and redistributing it, why did you make it GPL?

In any case, there is ample reason for RH not to distribute MPlayer. 
First, the questionable legality.  Second, the author prefers it not be
distributed if you take out the parts that cause the questionable
legality.
--
William Hooper