[MPlayer-users] ASF patenting ?

[Arpi]

Hi,

> On Thursday 11 July 2002 15:55, Arpi wrote:
> > > 'legal' to transcode from ASF to something else without too much of a
> > > hassle. I think if M$ had a problem with mplayer, we'd have heard
> >
> > probably they won't like it, but as mplayer doesn't run on windows yet,
> > they don't care. as soon as win32 port is done, we may get conflict with
> > m$, it's the no.1 reason i'm against win32 port...
> what makes you think this will more likely cause a conflict then mplayer being 
> able to do this on unix? 

the asf business they do is related to desktop systems, where unix is rare.
windows users won't use unix mplayer, but use their windows media tools.

but as soon as we do a full, working win32 port, they will see a competitor.

for example, see openoffice.
do they care about it? i don't think so, but it's a real competitor of their
office suite. but, few months ago a hungarian company released office suite
based on openoffice beta, a hungarian spell checker and their support and
handbook for half cost than M$ office, and M$ immediatelly "killed"
this company. they done the same as with lindows, said that name and the
colors of the box (rotfl) confuses users. they said, that the picture of a
laptop with blue screen (not bsod, just a very small icon at the corner of
the box) uses 'the colors of microsoft' and so confuses users. and they won.
the big fish eat the small fish... even if teh small fish is the good one.

unfortunatelly law at hungary is a bit bizarre, there are no actual laws or
precedences for such things, so anyone with enough money can win anything.

the previous government had close relationship with m$, unfortunatelly. they
even gave ~ 12.000.000 $ to M$ to lower the cost of win2k for students. of
course, none of the students buy it... so they gave the money as a gift :(
from our taxes...


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer, the Movie Player for Linux - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu