Scrive Gwenole Beauchesne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Thomas Rösch wrote: > > > you find " License": > > > > MPlayer is GPL now. In the past it contained non-GPL code from the > > OpenDivX project, which did not allow binary redistribution. This > has > > been removed. > > > > So mplayer should be OK. > > As Giuseppe said, the problem may go beyond a license issue. That is, > for > instance an MPEG4 implementation, if they do provide support for such > format, may be covered by some patents. > > Bye, > Gwenole >
AFAIK, MPlayer is a very cool software (not only as a generic player, but also as encoder, and now it seems even supporting Sorenson v3 COCEC, although trough some wine code), and my personal opinion is that it will be fine to have it in MAIN. IMHO the problems could be with MPEG4 issues, as seems the MPEG4 standards wants royalties: http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr18.html?LANG=en Of course in mind of the MPEG4 commitee there was to get royalties from hardware makers (e.g. in embedded systems) not from free software writers... AFAIK the MPEG4 implementation is into libavcodec of FFMPEG which mplayer uses. I'm not a legal expert but it would be nice if someone with law & patents knowledge could clarify this situation from point of view of a commercial Linux distribution, as to me seems similar to those for MP3 encoders or the Unisys LZW algorithm. Certainly the same criteria applies either the package is in contrib or in main (btw, isn't current xine already using libavcodec?). Bye. Giuseppe.
