[MPlayer-G2-dev] Legal issues: would companies really pay?

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

Hello,

Gabuccino is really sure companies will pay for mplayer licenses. Would
they?

Imagine mplayer license the core under BSD to them... to make it worth,
it need to be a good amount of money, since we want to help developers
AND have a fund to fight lawsuits.

Now this company find some bugs and fixes them, no code back to
mplayer.

Then a second company comes along and instead of licensing from
mplayer, it licenses from the company who licensed from mplayer, for
90% of the price and with bugfixes.

The company who first licensed could even start to port from current
mplayer to its own copy, they will be stealing, but as they have some
licensed parts, it will be difficult to prove to non-tech people
(court) that they did steal code.

In a even worst scenario, the second company maybe didn't know mplayer,
bought the code and later discover mplayer and argue someone is giving
the same code they bought for free (GPL version) and make a real mess.

So, together with other points argued by Rich and Rik, 2-licenses will
not help at all.

I liked Rich's idea of MPlayer developers being employed to help
improve mplayer, or customize it, etc... so they could have some money.

In the worst case, we should have the core licensed under LGPL, so the
damn-closed codecs (like pay-per-view, etc) could use their non-free
modules linked with mplayer. 
   But we need to know how many devs will want this, how many want to
make a living from mplayer this way and stuff like this.

Maybe you are elluded with the success mplayer have? MPlayer success
maybe make you thougth: Wow, what a piece of software! Many other
software are really worse than it and make money, shoudn't I make money
from it?
    Well, you really should make some money from it, it's really a
excellent piece of software, but the money should come other way than
that.
    And you should know (I know you know) that main reason for mplayer
success is being FREE, being OPEN [FOREVER], being GPL. Maybe if you
were BSD, many users wouldn't send you code, collaborating to other
project instead.

    MPlayer was bought to play things made by enterprise who care
nothing about us, people. You devs worked hard and now your player is
the best cost/benefit out there and they want your code, should you
give it to them? So what, they will put more bad things in the world so
then you will reverse-engineer the whole thing to be able to play it?


Gustavo

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