Include MPlayer in beta?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, William Hooper wrote:

>Botoaca Andrei said:
>> For any readers of this POST! Read the mplayer site news, you can find
>> them
>> at www.mplayerhq.hu ...
>> Suse added MPlayer to their distro, and they shouldn't have done this ...
>>
>> Read it, it's quite interesting ...
>
>Yes, it is interesting that someone that claims to be against software
>patents is threating to patent their software...
>
>"I (A'rpi) want to ask all of those distributions to consider dropping
>MPlayer packages completely instead of shipping unusable crippled files!
>Our motto: if you can't do it right, you better don't do it at all! Users
>can still download the sources and compile them at their own
>responsibilty. We do know the legal issues well, but since the whole
>multimedia industry is completely covered by various patents, it's
>impossible to create a decent free multimedia player without breaking most
>of these patents. I'm even considering patenting my A-V sync algorithms
>used in MPlayer G2, to prevent unwanted crippled distribution of the next
>generation code, but I hope they will recognize their fault in time, and I
>won't have to do so."
>
>Back on topic, I see this as a request by the one of the authors for Red
>Hat not to ship their software.

That shouldn't be hard to comply with since Red Hat does not ship 
mplayer and has not ever to my knowledge shipped mplayer.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat