Am Di 04.10.2005 14:40 schrieb Martin Sommer
Not much: You need only:
- convince all developers of the xine project (>30) that they change the xine license from GPL to LGPL or BSD (use alternatively the mplayer or the ogle project or write one from scratch)) to be able to link against the proprietary CSS stuff - sign a contract with the DVD CCA to get the official CSS technology - pay 19,000 USD a year to DVD CCA - implement the CSS technology into xine - talk to all major graphics card vendors and convince them to support Linux and provide interfaces for the use of macrovision in Linuxplayers - implement it into the player - sign a contract with Dolby for decoding dolby 2 channel and/or 6 channel sound - pay approx. 0.8 - 1.50 USD per sold copy of the program to Dolby (depends on sound quality and the number of sold copies) - sign a contract with MPEGLA for decoding mpeg2 video format - pay 2.50 USD per sold copy to MPEGLA (independent from numbers)
And that is too hard for Novell? But Linspire can handle it: http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details.php?product_id=11804 The download of that "app" is just 0.04MB in size. And it is declared as "closed source". So, it might be just the library. What the price is concerned, I suggested more than once on the list, that Novell should sell it seperatly online. Just a quick calc for the price: Estimate to sell 10'000 copies: - 1.90 USD to DVD CCA - 1.50 USD to Dolby - 2.50 USD to MPEGLA - 5.00 USD to Novell (engineering) Total cost for Novell: USD 10.90 per copy. Sell it for USD 39.99. Or the other way around: Sell it for USD 39.99. Fixed cost: - 19'000 USD to DVD CCA - 50'000 USD to Novell (engineering) Variable cost: - 1.50 USD to Dolby - 2.50 USD to MPEGLA Like that, Novell must sell approximately 2'000 copies in order to be at break even. That sounds possible to me. The engineering cost I estimated is either for adopting LinDVD or PowerDVD in order to work with SuSE Linux, or to find a solution to get it legally work with xine or Mplayer. If that solution just works with the binary drivers from ATI and Nvidia that would even be a beginning. Dani