[MPlayer-G2-dev] the awakening, license changes and so on...

[Diego Biurrun]

Arpi writes:
> 
> I'LL BE BACK:

Who are you?

Terminator 4 - Return of the Coders

Hasta la vista bits!

;-)

OK, enough cheesy jokes for today, SCNR.

> Some of you already know from irc, i'm planning to continue work
> ok mplayer g2 core from september. I left g2 because of the license
> conflict: i don't like gpl, especially for the g2 core, and no, i
> did not change my option, but the license :)

The main question, though, is: Which license will attract the highest
number of (quality) developers in the long run.  You won't be
developing it alone after all.

IMNSHO there is a clear preference among developers:

BSD < LGPL < GPL

Just so there is no misunderstanding: Of course there are BSD devs and
people who prefer BSD over the others (same for LGPL), but if you make
statistics you will come up with the above relationship.  This may not
be the case for proprietary software developers and their bosses, but
it surely is the case for free software (open source whatever you want
to call it) developers.  Just compare the amount of development done
on MPlayer by the former and the latter.  I doubt we will see this
change.

> NEW LICENSE:
> So i plan to change g2 core license to lgpl.
> So no dual licensing, no commercial licensing and such mess.
> LGPL should be better for a (set of) library(es) anyway, and
> it let commercial users to link it with their optionally
> closedsource UIs, drivers etc.
> We won't get money directly (opposed to original dual licensing plan),
> but as iive said, nobody wants money, so it should not be problem. :)

I much prefer dual licensing to LGPL (and I was not against dual
licensing).

IMO this is the worst of both worlds.  We don't get the funds that
might come in through dual licensing and we don't have the protection
and patch feedback offered through the GPL.

> Although it can be expected that some commercial users (think of
> settopbox, divx player etc makers) will sponsor some of you to do
> custom development for them. I'm personally not interested much in
> these, but i was asked by several companies in the past year
> (including some quite big ones), so i know there is such interest.

We've heard many rumours about that, but no backing at all.  Is it a
secret?  Did you sign some sort of NDA?

I just don't believe in companies adopting LGPL MPlayer and
contributing back useful things.  The companies that want LGPL MPlayer
are the ones not interested in contributing back.  Why should we be
interested in them or make life easier for them?

> WHY NOT GPL?
> GPL is just too limited for the purpose of g2 core. Even Michael and
> Alex agreed on irc. We need some license which allows at least linking
> to plugins and UIs under different (even closed source) license.
> Why? Think of a 3rd party company developing codecs (like 3ivx, On2 etc)
> they want to make their codecs available for linux (and other unix)
> platforms natively (no DLL hack), but they cannot open the source,
> or they can but they dont want to put it under GPL.

What license would they put it under?  BSD?  Surely not..

> The second reason is commercial users, ie settopbox makers etc.
> I was contacted by several companies in the past, with very different
> targets of use. It ranges from driving 16000x4000 pixel giant displays
> (using industrial 16-head vga cards), to driving 3-d hologram projectors,
> or to be used in advertisement display kiosks in 24/7 for months without
> a reboot/restart. They all need very stable linux-based player core.
> And they all need less restrictive (than gpl) license.

Why would you need such a thing to drive such a kiosk?  What's the
difference between a video and a browser kiosk?  I have seen browser
kiosks running Linux + Mozilla.  I mean why would they need a
different license?

Again, please put your money where your mouth is, so to say, and tell
us which company offered what.

We have been talking to companies at LinuxTag that wanted to sponsor
GPL MPlayer and even G2 development.  It's not true that you cannot
get corporate backing with the GPL.

The city of Münster wants to become the most wired city in the world
(they have fiber all over already) and offer high performance WLAN and
content streaming for its citizens.  They want to build all the
infrastructure on free software and release everything they create as
GPL.  They were looking at MPlayer for the client part of the
streaming solution.

Then there was another company that wants to sponsor G2 development as
a backend for a VJ (video jockey) application.  I forgot their name
and apparently lost their damn business card, but Alex should have it.

> Since these applications are far from as-is use, they usually need
> custom plugins, uis, and they are willing to sponsor us to do that.
> (note to Rich and friends: sponsoring not only means money, it may mean
> added code/patches, hardware to developers, new server and so on)

Please explain in more detail why and how company X would benefit from
an LGPL G2 and - more importantly - how WE (the developers and the
whole community) would benefit from providing such a thing.  Obviously
all of us love giving away their work, but not under any condition.
In your model, what is the difference to free labor?  Why are you
interested in making things easy for companies that are not interested
in contributing back?

> LICENSE CHANGE:
> the code released in g2 peview47 is mostly under gpl. it means
> we need to change license, with the agreement of authors. so,
> if you are author of some code in g2, and you disagree with the
> lgpl, tell us asap, so we can replace your code.
> note, that most of the code in g2 core is written by me, or being
> copied/inherited from g1.

Since G1 has been written by so many people I think it will be
extremely hard to change its license and even to rid G2 of G1 code.

> VF: i plan to use my code from pre47, and don't wait for Rich's
>     vaporware. and as Rich will probably refuse LGPL anyway,
>     it should not be a problem :)

>From talking to Rich I know that he is opposed to LGPL.

> i expect big flames about this, but please keep it short :)

I tried my very best.

BTW, I sincerely do not intend to start a huge flamewar, I just don't
understand your motivation and cannot understand your reasoning.

Diego