Wodim trouble

[Joerg Schilling]

Simo Sorce <ssorce at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 12:58 +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > 
> > The conclusion of all lawyers I did talk to, is that there is no legal
> > problem 
> > with original source.
>
> There is no problem with the **source**, but the binary results most
> probably cannot be distributed, because they combine in a single work 2
> incompatible licenses.

Mkisofs is fully under GPL and there is no single work created that
combines licenses. For this reason, there is no problem with the binaries.
Note that Sun of course distributes binaries and that Sun legal checked whether
distributing binaries from cdrtools could cause problems. 

> Have you thought about using GPLv3 instead ?

When the first GPLv3 draft was announced, the GPLv3 looked very interisting as
GPLv3 was announced to be more permissive against OSS than GPLv2 but unfortunately, 
the final GPLv3 is a more restrictive license than GPLv2.

> It may be more compatible with CDDL (needs to be run through real
> lawyers first of course).

While the GPLv2 gives explicit compatibility for GPLd programs to use any kind
of independent library (as an independent library does not create a drived work
from just linking against it), GPLv3 introduced a limitation against such 
combinations that is not in GPLv2.

BTW: I am happy to see your post as this is the first post from a Red Hat person
that looks respectful and interested in a solution. I hope we can find a 
solution for the current problem.



Jörg

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