[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 02:41:40PM +0100, Attila Kinali wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 14:23:19 +0100 (CET)
> Arpi <arpi at thot.banki.hu> wrote:
> 
> 
> > Rich: you misunderstood my mail. read it again please.
> > i do NOT want it to be under the BSD license.
> > I proposed something to dual-license it under GPL (or LGPL) and
> > a commercial license, which allows the license buyer similar things
> > like the BSD one (compile into closedsrc code, preserve credits)
> > 
> > The key point here is that they cannot use that bsd-like thing for free,
> > they have to buy it, for lots of money. Ie they dont steal your code, they
> > buy it. (it's the next topic, to how to handle the money. we clearly need
> > a company for that, and what to do with the money: share between
> > developers, buy hw for developers, buy hw for server etc...)
> 
> Hmm... This makes things a bit complicated.
> Ie we'll need, as Kis Gergely suggested, a company or rather
> a small foundation to handle that.
> What i dont like about this idea is, that we'll get quite
> an amount of legal stuff to handle which takes a lot of time.

So what should be done if SCO sue mplayer staff for developing on Linux thus
they may handle mplayer as a derivate work of original UNIX somehow ;-) Ok
this sounds VERY stupid, but SCO may do that since they're totally crazy. If
you collect money, you should sign contracts. So lawayer may be an issue,
you can't say 'IANAL' anymore, you NEED at least one lawayer. And what about
patents, and what about the issue when patent holder sue you ... Maybe at
the PRESENT time they say 'oh well, those free software guys, who cares'.
But if you start to SELL stuff for money, maybe this situation will change
... I don't think so this is a simple issue.

For non commercial method:

You should read license GPL/LGPL if you want to redistribute (possibly modified)
source, but you can use original BSD license (or whatever?) if you want to
embedd mplayer into a project which is *CLOSED* source (distributing only
binary code) and the project is not a media player software only a part
of it, like firmware of a DVD player.

This would be a quite nice MPlayer license, because someone may use mplayer
in his project without the need of release his source as well, but if somone
wants to redistrute the source of even a derivate work of MPlayer they must
take care of GPL instead. Or something similar?

- Gábor (larta'H)