[MPlayer-users] Re: License

[Arpi]

Hi,

> I don't think this is completely true, but there is a serious gray area
> right now. MPlayer itself is "basicly GPL" according to
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/info.html, but that's the only place I can
> find a reference to MPlayer's license! To be properly protected by the GPL,
> the source code must include a copy of the license - somebody needs to
> include the file "COPYING" that you can find with so many other packages in
It's just waste of space. Everyone knows the content of that file, why to
waste another 30k of space with it?
One of my first thing after a new installation is doing
find / -name COPYING -exec rm {} \;

It has no sense of all programs having this file and most of them installs
it to /usr/doc.

Mayeb we should add a symlink to teh source, pointing into the kernel source
tree :)

> the MPlayer source. It's also wise to refer to the GPL in the command line
> usage screen, and to place at least a one-line "Copyright (c) YEAR,
> PersonWhoWroteIt" comment at the top of each source code file. (Making it
It's described the the AUTHORS file (nowdays the appendix of docs.html).

> two lines, with the second line referring readers to the COPYING file, is a
> good idea.) So the biggest issue is that MPlayer isn't even properly
> PROTECTED by the GPL at this time.
Who cares?

> The GPL doesn't cover activities OF a GPL program, only of other programs
> against the GPL program. I've never seen a GPL Windows codec DLL - the DLLs
> that are included with MPlayer don't violate the GPL, nor do any other
> libraries. They may violate OTHER licenses held by Microsoft and so forth
> (and probably do, until somebody gets around to rewriting them which is a
> PITA), but they don't violate the GPL itself.
ok

> The question involves modification. If modification of a GPL program takes
> place, due credit and reference to the original license must take place, and
> source must be provided. (Actually, notice is due no matter what.) So, the
> questions:
> 
> Which modules that would be included in binary form in MPlayer are covered
> by the GPL? I don't see ANY license files on the libraries like libavcodec.
> I would assume they were covered by SOME license...? If so, removing the
> reference to the license violates the GPL.
Everything except opendivx library is GPL. Only exception: I personally
don't allow binary distribution of my demuxer and a-v sync code (demux*.c),
_until_ we implement modularity (plugins) and runtime cpu detection.

> More importantly, were any of these libraries modified in any way? If so,
Yes, most of them. They were optimized, and API sometimes changed to fit our
needs.

> binary distribution will be a problem. Otherwise, you can simply dynamically
> link to them and stop wasting your time worrying about licenses.
as it was explained many times, dyn linking such libraries is a big
performance loss.

We dynlink everything which is possible, for example libcss/libdvdread
SDL etc. But the codecs are really needs every CPU clock, so we don't want
to waste that 15-20% for the extra indirect indexing.


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
mailto:arpi at thot.banki.hu
http://esp-team.scene.hu