mplayer vs. xine

[Eric S. Raymond]

Peter Backlund <peter.backlund at home.se>:
> Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> >Peter Backlund <peter.backlund at home.se>:
> >
> >>I believe the philosophy of livna is to only carry things that are 
> >>re-distributable, with regards to the author of the software. That 
> >>excludes RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Java, Win32 codec dlls etc.
> >
> >
> >These are all redistributable in some form or other.  Some have technical
> >restrictions on repackaging, but that's not quite the same thing as
> >being locked up entirely.
> 
> If this is correct, it is certainly good news. However, I based my claim 
> on the following:
> 
> 1. I actually emailed Adobe on behalf of the Fedora Project, asking for 
> permission to repackage and redistribute Acrobat Reader. They declined.
>
> 2. I also contacted Real, but they never answered (at least not yet, 4 
> months later. I'm not holding my breath). They also make you fill in a 
> form when downloading the player, so it seems unlikely that they would 
> be OK with redistribution.

These are what I called technical restrictions on redistribution.  If
livna.org is willing to run afoul of patents and the DMCA to distribute
libdvdcss, it's hard to believe they'd balk at violating these.  But I'll ask.

> 3. The JPackage project do not supply binaries of Sun's JDK/JRE (or any 
> other JRE for that matter), but only src.rpm version, where you download 
> the JDK/JRE and rebuild the binary rpm yourself. I simply assume that 
> they have looked into the distribution situation quite carefully.

If yum can install SRPMS this doesn't seem like a problem.

> 4. About the codecs, I find it _very_ hard to believe that Microsoft for 
> one would be OK with redistributing Windows Media binary dlls?

Do the terms on their site say you can't pass around copies of the
zipfile?  I don't think so...
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>