[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer licensing [and lotso other stuff as I'm typingSat Nov 24 12:52:16 2001

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 05:29:20PM +0100, Jesus Climent wrote:
> If what scares you about GPL is the "stealing" code, BSD allows to take the
> code, modify it, and sale the modifications in closed_source format, as the
> guys from russia are doing, even without mentioning a shit about you.
> 
> I _REALLY_ would like to know what you, Arpi, have against GPL, since it
> has allowed you to use great peaces of code for making such a great program
> that mplayer is. With those projects in GPL you have been able to borrow the
> code and modify it, improve it.

Imho Arpi is not against GPL his problem is about the fact that users
using GPL softwares may even be in big trouble because of SOME points of
GPL. Afaik the source of his opinion was the fact that he couldn't compile
a non-GPL driver into the GPLed Linux kernel so he couldn't use at it all
(since it was some boot device or so, ask him :). Of course he would have
used initrd. But there is some truth about the fact that GPL has got SOME
disadvantages as well. But imho there's NO license which can avoid stealing
code, guarantee freedom without ANY possible negative effect. That's simply
impossible since a single software (like Linux kernel) must consist of
pieces licensed with the same rules as its components ... So in our
non-perfect world I must treat GPL as the BEST available option ...

> 
> But again, this is my _own_ opinion, and as such, evetybody can argue 
> against it.

No offense against your opinion, imho: agreed :)

- Gabor