[OT] MPlayer is in trouble - All my thoughts go with you.

[Neill Miller]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 12:09:10PM -0500, Derick Centeno wrote:
> I'm surprised at some people's attitude about this.

Me too!

> Software, is one more category of recognized talent and achievement.  
> Whether it is of a cooperative corporate nature or strictly small 
> business, respecting and acknowledge the efforts of prior work is only 
> appropriate.  If one is however going to use, apply, borrow or outright 

You're right, but it seems that you've never written a piece of
software or read about the specifics of the issue.  You can start
here, as the mplayer front page suggests:

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/industry-at-risk.html

If similar patents were applicable in the music industry, there would
be far less music in the world, as things as vague as simple
progressions could be claimed and disallowed by others.  In case you
haven't noticed, there are thousands of songs with the same
progressions behind them, as there are thousands of programs with the
same ideas/features behind them (e.g. patent #5,175,857: Quicksort
implemented using a linked list of pointers to the objects to be
sorted).  BTW, enforcement of art/music _copyright_ is handled
differently (in most cases much more appropriately) because it doesn't
involve patents.  However, your e-mail program is probably infringing
on several software patents *because* it acknowledges the efforts of
prior work.

-Neill.

-- 
http://www.thecodefactory.org/neillm