Dragon Player in kdereview, proposed move into kdemultimedia

[Dirk Mueller]

On Wednesday 30 January 2008, Ian Monroe wrote:

> > I can't think of anything less useful than that :-( It essentially means
> > that we can not play anything with it legally (because of patent
> > relicensing clauses).
> So I suppose we should remove phonon-xine because its useless too?

No, it is LGPL. Also all the other phonon engines, at least those maintained 
by Trolltech. 

> Where were your objections then?

None, because there aren't any. 

> In reality Max Howell and I don't really care about adding a media
> codec exemption to Dragon Player.

Then please do that :)

> But it's not clear at all to me that 
> the Qt license exemptions allows that, it mostly looks like it
> doesn't.

That is correct, but not relevant as long as it is under GPLv2. It is at least 
questionable if patent licensing is disallowed under the GPLv2 (it is 
explicitely forbidden in GPLv3). 

In effect, I don't think it is a good idea to not care about proper licensing 
just because Qt licensing might break it. Qt licensing has changed repeatedly 
in the past, and it is not unlikely, considering that Trolltech will 
eventually realize this problem as well, that they're going to fix this issue 
in the future as well. Therefore I think it should be essentially that we 
anticipate, prepare for and even expect this change. I personally find it 
demotivating that we have yet another player moved to KDE even though there 
are alternatives (kaffeine, kplayer, perhaps others I don't know) available, 
and no clear winner is visible (or was chosen based on a code, usability or 
popularity based review). It is just bound to repeat the noatun/amarok 
conflict and the k3b/cdbakeoven/burncd conflict. 

> So anyways unless there's some phonon-yauap quackery, Dragon 
> Player or any other open source Phonon video player is useless to
> Novell, Inc.

This has nothing to do with Novell, Inc. specifically, because software 
patents affect anyone trying to distribute software to certain countries but 
thanks for trying it to drag it down to a personal level :)


Greetings,
Dirk