the libdvdcss issue

[Andreas Thienemann]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> Sure, the latter is a bit more complicated, but imho it's the right 
> thing to do, especially as the user might do something that is illegal 
> in his country.

I do not consider it our job to prevent people doing illegal acts.
Furthermore, the legality of decss is varying widely on a global scale.

If something is possible to ship, do it and let the end user worry about 
the consequences. Realistically speaking, I think we're giving the DeCSS 
issue way more thought then it deserves. Realistically thinking, nobody is 
going to be sued over a piece of software which was last in the news 
nearly ten years ago when 2600 did the CSS stunt.
If our distribution sites are okay with it and we have a packager who's 
willing to touch it, we should ship it IMHO.

Right now the discussion about libdvdcss seems to me to be rather 
inconsistent. The reasons being put forward why we're not shipping decss 
code can be equally applied to other pieces of code in our repo.

regards,
 andreas