[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] DivX6 support

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:37:17AM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Friday, 23 June 2006 at 03:31, Rich Felker wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 12:20:46AM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > > A couple of kilobytes does not constitute bloat IMVHO, but considering
> > > the recent unrarlib discussion I'm beginning to think that including
> > > code solely for the purpose of using a proprietary library may not be
> > > such a good idea after all. Lets treat this as a proof-of-concept
> > 
> > To elaborate on this issue, I don't think we should be infringing the
> > GPL on the GPL code we've imported (by linking new proprietary
> > libraries) if we want to complain when other people infringe on
> > MPlayer. Otherwise we just look like hypocrites...
> 
> I've read the relevant parts of the GPL and I don't think distributing
> source code that uses an external proprietary library (which we're not
> distributing) is infringing.

It's not infringing in itself, but at some point somebody will link with
that library and the result is a legal mess.  Free hooks for non-free
code are always problematic because the end result is going to be
non-free.

Diego