Lindows DVD player and xine

Hi,

I'd like to report the information I got from informal talking with
Lindows people. We have contacted Kevin Carmony (President/COO) and Tom
Welch (CTO) and they have being very kind answering our concerns.
AFAICT, Lindows is distributing xine in accordance with GPL terms. Just
to make it clear:

- xine is not being linked to any proprietary code.
- the modifications they have made to xine-ui are available to people
who receive the software (links have being posted recently to these
patches)
- they are using libdvdcss to access dvds. libdvdcss is a GPL library
created by videolan guys.

So what makes Lindows's DVD player (more) legal? The difference is that
Lindows is paying a per copy royalty to some DVD organization, and
somehow that agreement should keep them free from any trouble. I really
don't know more about it, but it sounds like a very interesting case. I
wonder if it would be possible to create some independent organization
to make a similar agreements for users who believe to be infringing some
law by watching DVDs and want to pay for it... ;-)

Anyway, the point is: this might be a good opportunity for cooperation
between xine project and Lindows. I suggested them to start by
subscribing to xine-devel so we can establish a channel of
communication.

Some of the possibilites of cooperation I can imagine include providing
good and concise bug reports, patches or bug fixes, sponsoring
developers with specific DVDs or sponsoring some specific feature.
Making xine available to a wider audience is a good thing imho, and may
help stabilizing the codebase faster.

regards,

Miguel




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