[MPlayer-dev-eng] FFII software patent demo, politics, KiSS

[Diego Biurrun]

Hello everybody!

As some of you already know, Alex, I and a few more Hungarians (from
Hungarian LUGs and free software organizations) attended the demo and
conference against software patents in Brussels on wednesday 14 and
thursday 15 last week.  Maybe we will post some pictures later on.  It
was an interesting event and we hope to have convinced some
politicians that patents on software are a *BAAAD* idea.  Here are
some links with infos and pictures:

http://demo.ffii.org/
http://www.ael.be/
http://plone.ffii.org/events/2004/bxl04/pr/

The event was fun.  We took part in the demonstration, I got
interviewed for the Spanish TV and the .hu people paraded around with
a Romanian flag.  Well, we all know they are a peculiar bunch ;-)

In the afternoon there were conference sessions with lots of speakers
explaining why sw patents are not good and the two guys from the
European Patent Office very much in the defense.  There were quite a
few politicians present and a few of them seemed to have got the
message.  I had a person related to the commission (member?,
assistant?, secretary?) sitting next to me, so I got the opportunity
to do some heavy lobbying and pull him over from the dark side.  At
the end of the day he did seem to have changed opinions.  Let's hope
for the best when the European Commission votes in June.

In the evening all the people attending the conference had dinner
together in a big Spanish restaurant and afterwards it was off to a
pub with the Hungarians to get a taste of Belgian beer.

The next day started with conference talks again, this time from the
participants and thus I gave a 5 minute talk explaining in layman's
terms how and why open source development works and the Hungarians
presented their many free software organizations.

Afterwards there was a Linux installation party, which we used to read
mails and reorder the AUTHORS file.  But the best was yet to come.

Alan Cox (of Linux kernel fame) and Georg Greve (president of the FSF
Europe) were present and we talked to both about multimedia software
and its legal situation in general and the KiSS situation in
particular and got some very good legal advice from very experienced
people.  It's encouraging to see that the FSF is well aware of our
case and willing to assist us with advice and more if we wish to.  We
also made the acquaintance of Gitte Wange.  She is the 23 year old,
energetic chairwoman of the SSLUG, a LUG based in Denmark and Sweden
and she was eager to talk to us once she heard we were from MPlayer.
It turns out she wanted to offer us her help and sue KiSS in our
name.  She even had started raising funds already!  The story seems to
have stirred up some waves in Denmark.  Some of the people from her
LUG have mailed KiSS asking for sources and Gitte went to visit KiSS
personally.  She talked to Mr Christensen and demanded that they come
clean and release sources.  Later that day she got phoned up by the
KiSS CTO or something and was offered a job.  These people are playing
strange games, it cannot have all been good looks and skill.  Oh, she
declined, since she knows people who work at KiSS and disliked the
company even before, she has a startup of her own and would never join
under these circumstances.

The talk with Georg, Alan, Gitte and the other people was very
encouraging.  We have a good standing in the community and we sure can
rally up some support if we need/want to.

On a more technical note, a thing both Alan and Georg would love to
see in the future are free codecs.  It's true, apart from flac, ffv1
and MJPEG all seem to be patent encumbered.  We told them we are
working on a next generation free container format.  Georg had an idea
that Alan liked very much: We might make MPlayer print out an
informational warning message if it plays patent encumbered formats.
He said that should we decide to implement such a thing the FSF will
help us with researching the relevant patents.

Oh, and of course Alex and I had the opportunity to talk a lot about
MPlayer and what is to become of it.  Let's all meet at Linuxtag,
these events are real fun and give you lots of motivation!

Diego