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

[Stefan Parviainen]

On Thursday, October 14, 2010 05:49:53 pm Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 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.

Why exactly would it be a problem to conflict with the rpmfusion package 
(honest question)? Also, could the rpmfusion people not simply give their 
package a higher priority than the one in the Fedora repos? IIRC this is how 
Debian does it.

I'm interested in packaging a stripped version of mplayer, but I feel it would 
be a waste of time if any package is refused due to legal reasons anyway. I 
would, therefore, feel more comfortable if any legal issues could be resolved 
before I start work on packaging. If a list of "bad" formats can not be given, 
how about a list of "known good" ones? At least the ones currently included in 
GStreamer should be OK, right?

-- 
Stefan