OK, let me try to explain some things. "Q" wrote: > It was he who did the circumvetion, not you or anyone else, that is why the > lawyers went after him and not just ordinary every day users. In any case > Jon has been aquitted of all charges against him, so we still have to see > an example of a single sucessful prosecution of anyone using their Linux OS > and associated applications for legitamate reasons.
No, I don't want to wait. You're right, noone will go after a small Linux user, playing DVDs with libdecss. With the new law in Germany (and maybe other countries) this may be illegal, but who can proof it? On the other hand, if I make a program which can play copy protected dvds or even rip them, it's illegal. And if I put it on a web site, everyone will know this. Maybe they all don't care about the Linux people -- maybe not. I don't want to wait until they sue someone, because I'm the maintainer of Freevo, and it _is_ my problem. > Personally I do not relish the idea of going hunting on the web for > functionality that has been removed, when this functionality is now fairly > standard throughout nearly all Linux distributions. Why do you think SuSE and RedHat ship mplayer with some stuff removed? Why do you think Xine has no direct support for DeCSS? This is all about cracking the copy protection (DeCSS) and some binaries in mplayer to decode some stuff that are not free. I don't want to break the law in building a binary only that _you_ have it easy to watch DVDs. > If this were the case I would hope you would at least preserve two options, > one version of freevo fully enabled and hosted in a non hostile country and > one that kind of just sat there and didn't do much until you added it back > in yourself - if you were fortunate enough to find the components you need. Wrong! Freevo itself (as in everything _we_ do) doesn't break any law. Freevo can't watch a DVD or any video file. We use mplayer (or Xine) to do so. Because some users had problems finding all dependencies for Freevo, we started building the Freevo binary release, conatining everything you need. This is Freevo + stuff. When we kick mplayer out of the binary release, we don't remove any functions from Freevo, we only remove some deps you have to download elsewhere. > I don't see the logic in it myself, as the one thing most users will do is > try their hardest to immediately re-add this functionality back into freevo > (Perhaps even those argung for the removal of this functionality now would > do this too?) Again, it's not about what the users do privat at home, it's about what the developers do in public. > My biggest concern is for the average user who having installed freevo > sufddenly finds they can't use it for very much and if they do want any > interesting functionality they will have to go hunting on some pretty > obscure web sites with no gurantee that anything they find will be > compatable. Downloading xine and mplayer isn't that hard, isn't it? These are also no obscure web sites. We are not speaking about moving function xy from Freevo to a different webserver. Freevo itself is legal! Dischi -- Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for 'still doesn't work.' ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now. Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET. http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100003ave/direct;at.aspnet_072303_01/01 _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
