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RealNetworks & Helix Community to Build OpenSource Media Player

Submitted by stro on Wed, 2003-08-06 15:59. Gnome Multimedia

Today at Linuxworld RealNetworks announced the launch of the Helix(TM) Player project.

The open-source Helix Player, with the addition of the RealAudio(R) and
RealVideo(R) binaries, will enable Linux, Unix and Solaris users for the first
time to enjoy a similar level of media playback and SMIL 2.0 support that
millions of consumers do today using the free RealOne(TM) Player on Windows
and Mac.

Helix Player will feature a GNOME/GTK interface along with a Mozilla browser plugin. THe player will also support Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and more.

www.faifzilla.org

Submitted by coriordan on Thu, 2003-08-07 21:24.

Hi Aeonsfx,

I'm afraid you've got some mixed up info about the origin of the GPL. The first draft of the GPL appeared in 1986, six years after all the MIT hackers had been hired away. He already had written and released GNU Emacs, GCC, and GDB, each with their own free license. The General Public License was written to fit any piece of software so that code could be taken from one GPL'd program and added to another. (Eben Moglen provided legal advice for the GPL, version 1.0 came out in 1989).

The point was always to guarantee that users would have freedom (no author control), and that these freedoms must be preserved for everyone (copyleft).

> WITH copyleft, there's no incentive for companies

> to think twice about open source

IBM, SuSE, RedHat, Sun, Apple, CodeSourcery, all release GPL'd software *and* all of them assign copyright for some of their work to FSF.

I'm not sure I understand your last paragraph. Are you unhappy because BSD-licensed code cannot use GPL'd code? I don't see this as much of a problem. The GPL isn't there to make everyone happy by giving in to their every whim. It's there to give people freedom, and guarantee that that freedom will not be taken away. Incompatibility with the BSD license is unfortunately necessary to guarantee these things.

www.faifzilla.org is a free biography of RMS, it's very interesting. Anyway. I must sleep.

Ciaran O'Riordan

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