[Fedora-legal-list] Reasons for not including MPlayer in main repository?

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 10/14/2010 07:01 AM, Stefan Parviainen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 02:43:15PM +0400, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
>> 2010/10/14 Stefan Parviainen <pafcu at iki.fi>:
>>
>>> The main issue nowadays is probably patents. Apparently support for some
>>> formats can not be included without breaking some patents. Does anyone
>>> on this list have an idea which formats are problematic from the point
>>> of view of the Fedora project? Would removing support for these formats
>>> make it possible to include a stripped version of mplayer in the Fedora
>>> repositories?
>>
>> Removal of "patented" codecs from mplayer renders it almost completely
>> useless. I'd rather to stay with rpmfusion package.
> 
> Sure, "almost". I'd rather view free/unencumbered formats using software from the
> main repos. If you need support for other formats (I don't*) then you
> should use the rpmfusion version. But the question was not what "[you]'d rather"
> do, but what obstacles prevent mplayer from being included in Fedora proper.
> 
> *assuming Ogg Vorbis/Theora are considered patent-free.

I cannot provide you a list of formats that are problematic.

The problem with mplayer is that it is structured in such a way that is
not modular, at least not in a way that we could in Fedora package
support for known safe formats, such as Ogg Vorbis/Theora, without
conflicting with an rpmfusion package that contains potentially
problematic formats.

~spot