[MPlayer-dev-eng] xine avi subtitle decoder licensing issue

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 10:26:43AM +0300, Nick Kurshev wrote:
> I guess that every source in mplayer which doesn't contain licence line is
> covered by mplayer's licence!!! Please see documentation.html:
> 
> #MPlayer is basically GPL, but contains some non-GPL code which is not
> #allowed to be distributed in binary form, and also contains the OpenDivX
> #library which has special license. We are still developing towards GPL.
> 
> In this case nobody can say which licence covers this file. Therefore
> it's covered by GPL.
> 
> Am I wrong, Arpi?

I know lots of the mplayer developers aren't too thrilled about binary
distribution until runtime cpu detection is fully working and full
speed (status on this, anyone?), and I don't much care for binary dist
anyway myself, but it would be nice to get all the sticky licensing
issues resolved. Aside from perhaps any reluctance due to disagreeable
people trying to distribute binaries that are slow or don't work on
all systems, what are the remaining obstacles to a fully GPL release?

Apparently OpenDivX is one, but it's not very useful and could easily
be taken out of the main source tree and made into an optional
library. But what else is there? Is there any desire for someone to
clean this stuff up, or do the powers that be prefer to wait?

Rich