[MPlayer-dev-eng] KiSS of copyright

[Svante Signell]

A few words from a marginal contributor to mplayer:

(I have been following the development (mostly as a user) of G1 for some
years now and will from now on look more into G2. However, I have been
following the GNU ideas  and using GNU tools for many years now, even
long before Linux was born...).
 
1. Why don't you try to get funding for a server by your users? I
believe that the users easily can raise the amount of money in a short
time. For example, I can think on making a small donation myself. There
are many examples of successful money-raising for free SW, see e.g.
Blender.
 
2. Don't mess with abusing companies yourselves without professional
help. E.g. FSF Europe can probably be of assistance. I know that many of
you have strong feelings w.r.t. FSF but they act for the freedom of the
users, and they are not tooth-less.

3. Don't accept a donation as an apology. This only creates new problems
in the future. In order to speak on behalf of the G1 developers I think
you need the approval from _all_ of copyright owners. In this case at
least the ones who have written the code that has been abused by KiSS.
Did you have that?

Furthermore I would like to give some input to the discussion on
licencing and other stuff for mplayer-g1/g2.

a) Keep the mplayer-g2 license GPL. Don't even go to LGPL. If you
change licensing I (and many with me) would loose my interest in mplayer
totally, switching focus to xine and/or vlc instead...
  
b) Assign the rights of mplayer-g2 to FSF and let them handle the
negotiations with code abusers. The others do the (boring) legal work,
while you do the fun stuff, such as coding...


On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 22:23, Gabucino wrote:
> Fabian Franz wrote:
> > > I'm not in favor of Kiss, but IMHO there's nothing wrong in that donation.
> > So the donation is kind of an apology of KISS ?
> Yes.
> 
> 
> > And they'll use no code of MPlayer in future releases of their hardware ?
> You should ask them instead.