[wplug] mplayer

Zach Paine zman at wplug.org
Fri Dec 21 22:40:35 EST 2001


On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 04:35:08PM -0500, Procario, Michael wrote:
> There was an article on Linuxworld (www.linuxworld.com) recently about
> mplayer. He mentioned that there is a gui but you have to enable it when you
> build it. It is not default. The article characterized mplayer as a good
> program with a rotten install and documentation.

Interesting side note:

mplayer has an interesting history w/ the GPL.  As you can see from this
google cache:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:r-HBJcgedLE:www.mplayerhq.hu/+mplayer+gpl&hl=en

In November one of the programmers went off on the GPL and said (poorly
translated I believe)

	On a press conference, A'rpi said the big truth: he hates GPL!
	Well this sounds very rude from him, but let everyone know what
	happened! The poor fella tried to compile a flash disk driver
	into the kernel to boot from it and... it wouldn't! The little
	geezer is non-GPL so he can't be compiled into the kernel, which
	is in fact GPL! Let me quote him:
	GPL SUX - Utalom!!! - kibaszott szemet! - which I now don't
	want to translate to english. Now he has rm -rf /*GPL* in
	crontab.
	Order MPlayer - Boycott GPL! T-shirts NOW! 

That certainly seems to lack a ring of truth.  The nvidia kernel driver
is non-GPL and it works in the kernel... maybe the translation is just
bad.

On the current webpage (mplayerhq.hu/homepage/news.html) there is a
story about a Russian programmer porting (read: hacking together)
mplayer to OS/2 without giving credit to the authors of the original
code.  The authors of mplayer (rightfully) became very upset and the
issue still hasn't been resolved.  

While they claim to dislike the GPL, mplayer is in fact licensed under
it, and it sounds like they are trying to use it to have the OS2.ru guys
give them credit.  

Interesting licensing story... what do you guys think of all this?

	-Zach



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