[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing try 2

[rsnel at cube.dyndns.org]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 03:46:43PM +0100, Gabucino wrote:
> > Is there a really good reason for you to help companies doing those
> > nefarious things?
> It helps the developers.
It helps the developers doing bad things (at least: things I consider
bad), unless you consider misfeatures like 'unable to save' to be good
things, more justification is needed.

> > I consider limiting the end user by crippling software
> What crippling? Read the thread again.
Suppose MPlayer is licensed to some 'pay-per-view' company, and that
company is given the right to distribute modified versions of MPlayer
to their users without giving the right to distribute modified versions
to their users (and withholding the sourcecode to the changes).

This company will probably add code to MPlayer to prevent it from saving
the downloaded data in an open format (a format which does not require
the user to pay up again if the user wants to see what he/she already
downloaded). (something which would be easy to counter if the company was
required to redistribute the source along with the binaries).

So the user gets software from which useful (and trivial)
functionality has been removed (i.e. has been crippled).

Companies are of course free to create crippled computers (Xbox, for
example which runs only 'approved' software) and software (RealPlayer,
which disallows saving certain rtsp streams), but I will not help them 
because I find it 'wrong'; they would have to hire programmers with
different moral standards (or that are in financial troubles and have a
family to feed) than me. (and allowing such companies to make
proprietary changes to a well-maintained softwarepackage helps them a
great deal; they only have to maintain their own changes)

Let me clarify the GPL/LGPL point. I can live with GPL/LGPL as long as
contributors are allowed to contribute GPL-only code. (as in
libavcodec). (but the LGPL encourages the creation of proprietary
software, so I like the GPL better)

Greetings,

Rik.

-- 
Nothing is ever a total loss; it can always serve as a bad example.