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

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 02:39:44AM -0300, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> 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.

BSD license? Of course not, this would be stupid. Instead you use an
entirely non-free license.

> 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.

Not possible. As opposed to a free one, a commercial license never
gives the recipient permission to sublicense. Do you think you can
take your copy of Windows from M$, and relicense it to people cheap?
Good luck trying it, but M$'s lawyers will have you in no time!

> 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.

I agree this is a big problem.

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

At least a couple lavc developers already have been hired to add
features, which businesses intend to use under the LGPL.

>     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?

Hahaha, well said! :)

Rich