Wodim trouble

[Joerg Schilling]

Julian Sikorski <belegdol at gmail.com> wrote:

> > On 11/02/2009 03:47 PM, Denis Leroy wrote:
> >> On 11/02/2009 07:18 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
> >>> That may be true, but since cdrecord is not shippable, it's a pretty
> >>> vacuous truth.
> >>
> >> Out of curiosity, was that just because of the GPL2-CDDL mix ? Or was
> >> there another reason ? Last I checked, only mkisofs is affected by that
> >> and the rest of cdrecord is pure CDDL. If we patched mkisofs away, would
> >> it be shippable ?

...

> opensuse are shipping cdrecord, maybe it would be worth checking what
> they changed, if at all?

There is no legal problem with the original software, there is only a social
problem caused by a hostile downstream (a Debian packager). See 
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html for an overview.

Let me give you some background on the legal situation:

There are some people who claim that there is a legal problem with the original
software but none of the persons who spread this claim (including people from 
redhat) did ever make a valid legal statement that could confirm a problem. As 
there are no valid legal arguments _against_ the situation in cdrtoools, there 
is obviously no way to discuss things and we need to rate the claims against 
cdrtools as libel.

I even tried to discuss the social problem with some people from redhat but I 
was only given FUD instead of arguments. In return, I repeatedly asked for legal
arguments that could be discussed, to no avail. So redhat also proves the same
and it is obvious that there are no valid legal arguments that could confirm a 
problem with the original softare.

Note that the GPL was designed to be compatible with all independently 
developed libraries under any license. This is a decision that was made in the 
late 1980s and I know the background of this diiscussion as I did take part in 
it. The GPL would have been completely unuaable if it was not made legally 
compatible with any independent library under any license. Even Eben Moglen 
confirmed that there is absolutely no problem with letting GPLd programs use
CDDLs libs as this is of course no more then "mere aggregation", and permitted
by the GPL.

On the other side, there is Sun. Sun is the biggest Donator of OSS and Sun 
definitely runs a legal review on _every_ piece of OSS that is going to make
it into Sun's Solaris distribution. This is needed because Sun also is the 
biggest target for atacks and legal cases and Sun for this reason is extremely
careful with distributing OSS. I can confirm that Sun lawyers are also very 
effective with detecting legal problems as they did themself find that 
"libcdio" creates a legal problem in GNOME. Sun immediately stopped shipping 
"libcdio" and we did create a replacement library that calls "cdda2wav" in 
order to avoid legal problems and in order to give better audio results. 

Sun did make a legal review on cdrtools im May 2006 already, but in order to 
be very sure, I asked Sun legal to repeat the legal review on cdrtools last 
autumn. After doing the review, Sun legal confirmed again that there is no 
problem with the original software.


It seems that the people who claim legal problems do not like to get into a 
discussion as with a fact based discussion, it would be easy to prove that 
they are wrong. As we have trustworthy confirmations from several sides,
I propose to asume that there is no legal problem dist distributing cdrtools
as long as nobody gives valid legal arguments.


Note that Suse already ships cdrtools again and that even Jörg Jaspert, the FTP 
master from Debian in a legally binding way agreed on distributing the original 
cdrtools again for Debian as soon as possible. See also:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html#Sun

It would be interesting to hear _arguments_ from redhat on why redhat still only
ships a broken fork with legal problems instead of the working original 
software that has no known legal problems....




Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily