[Fedora-legal-list] Legal CD/DVD/BD writing software for RedHat and Fedora

[Joerg Schilling]

Christoph Höger <choeger at cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:

> I am not in any way officially speaking for fedora, Just my 2ct:
>
> 1. FSF is very explicit about GPL and CDDL:

The FSF has no relevence for the cdrtools project as the FSF does not
own Copyright on the project. Please let us discuss relevent text only.


> > This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the
> > CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the
> > CDDL for this reason.

This is text that was not written by a lawyer and it is a proof that we
need to ignore claims from the FSF - sorry but the FSF is not a neutral
institution. The FSF has private interests with propagating own products.
This results in biased claims like the one above.

If you did read the articles from literature list I provided with my last
mail, you did even understand why this claim from the FSF is not correct.
Please read the articles from Lawrence Rose. He is a neutral lawyer and
he explains the GPL in full details.

> So at this point it seems to be illegal to distribute mkisofs. I wonder

The GPL was intentionally made compatible to any independent library under any 
license. See:

	http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GPL.PDF
	http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf

If you believe that the GPL does not offer this compatibility, then you
believe that any Linux distribution is illegal and you would need to remove 
the GPL from the list of approved OSS licenses and the licenses that follow the 
OpenSource definition in:

	http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

> 2. Jörg, could you please be more verbosive about why exactly fedora is
> currently violating UrhG? I cannot see how how you could revoke a once

I did do this to the initiators of the fork. As they have no interest in making 
the fork legal, it makes no sense to discuss this.

> granted license because they use "your" filenames. Especially: Which
> marks do you claim are required because of ?13 and since cdrkit is a
> derived work how do debian developers in _any_ way change _your_ work?

A license like the GPL is just a contract and a contract cannot enforce
claims that are in conflict with the related law. You only have the right to
modify the sources if you follow the rules from the law. As the initiators of 
the fork don't like to do this, the fork cannot be  legally distributed.

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