[MPlayer-dev-eng] NUT format

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 06:19:01PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > I think if NUT is solely promoted and supported by mplayer the NUT
> > format will not become ubiquitous.  However, an independent
> > organisation (website etc), giving away reference implementations of NUT
> > under BSD
> > licences would foster wider support IMO.
> 
> It's planned to release a reference implementation under an X11 or
> similar license (BSD without advertising clause).
> 
> It's also planned to write demuxers for other players like xine, vlc,
> winamp, maybe more

<IMHO>
Sorry, but I don't understand the problem here. The documentation itself
which describes the format is a DOCUMENTATION and not 'SOFTWARE'.
So at least some documentation related license can be considered but
software licenses are not perfect for this purpose.

The reference or any other implementation is another thing which can be
even a closed source software, because if documentation which describes
NUT is free someone can implement its own demuxer into its own close
source player as well.

It's like you can copyright a browser which can display HTML, but the
description of the structure of HTML itself is not copyrighted by you
at all. Sure, the HTML example is interesting, since it has got problems
which many different 'dialects' and vendor specific 'extensions' so maybe
it's not too bad idea to use some PROTECTION  against modifications in
NUT specification without release the information (but not the code/source
itself) by the modifier firm/person.

So I don't see the problem here.
</IMHO>

- Gábor (larta'H)