Re: Lindows DVD player and xine

Miguel Freitas wrote:
> 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
I don't think anyone is against Lindows. It gives linux more publicity 
as a desktop operating system which is good in my view. I have seen the 
diff files between our xine-ui and theirs. Are there any differences in 
xine-lib ?
I cannot find any diff files for xine-lib.

One thing I would really like is if Lindows have made some sort of 
agreement paying royalties for the DVD parts of Lindows, maybe they 
could get us a copy of the DVD standards. ;-)

I know writing libdvdnav is kind of fun without having any standards 
documents, but it would be nice to be able to find out how close we 
actually are!

Cheers
James



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