[MPlayer-cygwin] What to do about patents?

[Joseph Miller]

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What shall we do about patents and mplayer?  I was very distressed about the 
home page of MPlayer when I visited this weekend.  I immediately made backup 
copies of MPlayer so as not to lose such a valuable project.  I am in the 
United States and I regrettably do not know much about the politics of 
Europe.  If someone could give me a quick rundown, and particularly mention 
which countries this affects, whether the patents will be international 
(like, could I still use MPlayer here in the states), etc?  And what shall be 
the plan of action?  Could we move the project to another country that does 
not have software patents?  Is there another place that we can go to 
communicate further, and more privately, about this delicate topic?

And where can I go to stay up to date with what's going on over in Europe?  
Open source contributors are not so big over here.  Open source is basically 
only viewed as what can be capitalized on to make money.  It appears to me 
that the contributors in other countries are the ones that have built open 
source to the level that it acheived before Americans begain capitalizing on 
it.  It appears to me that a great number of contributors to open source are 
from Europe and I should like to learn more about it.

- -Joseph Miller
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