Include MPlayer in beta?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Jef Spaleta wrote:

>> distribution..." He doesn't want the package to be associated with the
>> crippled functionality certain packagers have visited on mplayer, and
>> is mulling what he can do. I appreciate his problem...
>
>I think someone on friendly terms with the mplayer author...should nudge
>'em into looking at using trademark law as a tool...instead of patent
>law to coerse the behavior of the distributors who want to use as much
>mplayer technology as they can legally get away with. Software patent
>law is just frelling evil. But if there is a concerned about tarnishing
>the mplayer "brand" by redistribution of limited functional variants of
>the mplayer codebase...then maybe there is room via trademark law...to
>protect the mplayer project name...and still have room for Suse or
>whomever to take that freely redistributable codebase, name it something
>else, and use it.

Windows Media player is "mplayer".  Good luck trademarking 
mplayer.  I'd also think it would be difficult to trademark 
illegal software.




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