[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing try 2

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 09:53:38PM +0100, Gabucino wrote:
> rsnel at cube.dyndns.org wrote:
> > Those customers would be the real losers, in the case of proprietary
> > licensing KiSS et al could just say 'no, we don't have to give you the
> > source because we bought a license from The MPlayer Foundation'. The
> > MPlayer Foundation would, in that case, have publicly sacrificed the
> > right of that costumer (and all other customers) to look at the source
> > for some money/hardware/whatever.
> I - personally - don't believe in that stuff.
> 
> Why would anyone want to recompile his DVD player's MPlayerG2, when he can
> have it for free on his computer? :o

Maybe we want to recompile our DVD player to add support for file
formats that are missing, so we don't have to pay the vendor to buy a
whole new player. Think of NUT support. Maybe they don't support NUT,
so we want to add it.

Now, a much more realistic scenario: The vendor wants to add some
nasty DRM/pay-per-view/etc. type functionality to their product based
on G2. Under GPL, they MUST release all their source, which renders
their evil DRM scheme useless. If they can just license MPlayer, then
they're able to make their DRM-enabled player, AND benefit from the
robustness and features of MPlayer. This is wrong!

Rich