Dragon Player in kdereview, proposed move into kdemultimedia

[Ian Monroe]

On Feb 4, 2008 3:39 AM, Dirk Mueller <mueller at kde.org> wrote:
[snip]
> So obviously in that case your exception statement does not change anything.
> In the other case, where the software stack is (L)GPL and your application is
> GPLv2/v3, there is a clear benefit from using an exception statement.

But given that part of the software stack is GPLv2/3 (Qt) then it
doesn't change anything right? Unless Nokia/Trolltech changes
something.

> In the end it comes down to your personal decision: Do you want people to be
> able to use your software by default on a distribution that has purchased
> licenses for video or audio codecs? Do you want them to switch to a different
> player? The sooner you decide the less problems you have with finding the
> agreement over all copyright holders to your project. the longer you wait the
> more contributions you'll get from all sorts of places.

Dragon Player is a small enough codebase that I'm not too worried. It
weighs in at about 3k LOC, thats about the size of a subsystem in
Amarok.

[snip]
> > I do share your concern about parts of trunk/KDE becoming a wasteland
> > of mostly unmaintained software. This is kind of what happened to
> > kdemultimedia in KDE3. We should be more aggressive in pruning
> > software in trunk/KDE. This shouldn't scare us into a situation of
> > just keeping everything in extragear, even software being released on
> > the KDE schedule. Kind of just shuffles the issue around.
>
> I agree about that, but it still leaves the question of the default player
> open :)

That's up to the distros to decide, like it's always been.

> > The only way (currently) to make a phonon video player that meets
> > Novell and Redhat's criteria would be for someone to buy a Qt license
> > and develop a video app with it.
>
> Wrong, actually. It is not the only choice, and it is neither the safest one
> (but I don't know the Qt/Commercial licensing terms, so I can't judge nor
> care).

I just assumed that Qt/Commercial licensing would let people license
however they wanted. Could be wrong of course.

> There is a very strong reason for Qt/Free being good enough if the media
> player has a codec exception. I don't think I'm allowed to say, but it should
> be pretty easy to guess if you read the flow of reasons given above.

I was looking for a guessing game... :|

Anyways if it doesn't change anything now, I won't bother changing it
now. I'll ping the Kaffeine dev's the next time I see them online,
they have some copyright over a file in Dragon Player. A switch to a
media codec exemption shouldn't be too hard, as Max Howell and I own
most of Dragon Player.

Ian