[gst-devel] Red Hat / Novell / Real announcement

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi,

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Joshua Ginsberg wrote:
> I was a bit shocked and surprised by the joint announcement by Red Hat,
> Novell, and Real that Helix will become the default media framework for
> the Red Hat and Novell desktop offerings. It seemed to me that the
> community (especially the GNOME community) had more or less agreed that
> GStreamer was the F/OSS media framework we were all looking for and that
> Red Hat and Ximian supported its tight inclusion into the GNOME desktop.

RedHat and Ximian are free to ship any media player they wish. GNOME has
openly stated that they need a LGPL or more free media framework. Helix
still doesn't meet that requirement.

I'm still unhappy by the fact that all interesting code in their players
is closed source. Also, their dual licensing is, to say the least,
worrying because any contributed code must be dual licensed as well and is
thus effectively owned by Real (since you give them the right to use it
on purely close-source products, something that seems to be against the
GPL imo). Not my type of project, obviously.

> So what happened? I'm just wondering if you guys have some insight I
> don't.

I'm affraid we know little more than you.

Ronald