I have come to understand that debian is planning to include a cripled version of mplayer in its distro. The makers of mplayer have objectet to this quite clearly and are now considering to use patents to somehow keep people from cripling their work and releasing it as mplayer. No one wants this, and no one will benefit from it.
We all understand that a legal version of mplayer is needed to release it, because of the evil software-patents. But since the makers of mplayer are against it, don't do it! Its their work, and they are proud of what they have done. A cripled version of mplayer will, as stated on mplayerhq.hu: "Unfortunately most users won't notice the small comments in distribution specific files (like README.SuSE, or README.Debian) and will tell their friends, magazines (which occasionally write distro reviews) and post on portals/forums that it (mplayer) is a very bad, broken, unusable application." If you do want to include mplayer in your distro, how about releasing it under another name than mplayer, so that the real and lovable mplayer won't be mistaken for a cripled and unusable application? To quote Bruce Perens explaining the 4. right of open source: "if you make a change, you might have to change the name of the program or mark out your change very clearly" Cheers Sindre Pedersen Bjørdal -- ___________________________________________________ OperaMail free e-mail - http://www.operamail.com OperaMail Premium - 28MB, POP3, more! US$29.99/year Powered by Outblaze
