[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 11:15:23AM +0100, Gabucino wrote:
> Having handled the Kiss Technology case, I absolutely agree with the
> dual-licensing. Its point is what Richard and the other guy didn't notice:
> we lose nothing with it. We have all the advantages of the GPL (we can
> sue anybody who fucking steals it), _BUT_ if the "offender" firm plays nice
> they will pay big bucks to us for using our code.

And everyone in the world loses freedom. Getting big bucks is not the
purpose. Maybe you want big bucks to impress teenie girls on the
beach, but I couldn't care less about such nonsense.

> On the other hand - if we don't have dual-licensing -, the just steal it period
> and we'll have to go to the court to get the compensation (and justice) we
> deserve.

If we go to court, we get the _real_ compensation we deserve: freedom
of the code. Or at least the court forces them to halt distribution,
in which case their product sucks and more people will use MPlayer
instead.

> About developer agreement about the second license: Fabrice already sells
> ffmpeg since years (with no advertised duallicensing), and I don't remember
> ever asking anybody for his agreement.

AFAIK Fabrice does this under the terms of the LGPL. This is very
different. He only holds copyright to a minority portion of libavcodec
and cannot relicense it at will.

So, now to make it more clear. I hate to issue ultimatums, but this
one is going to be very simple. If there's going to be ANY proprietary
licensing of mplayer code, I'm off the project, forever.

Rich