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

[Joerg Schilling]

"Christofer C. Bell" <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Joerg
> Schilling<Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> >
> > I am not going to re-introduce a license that acording to the private
> > interpretation from the initiator of the fork is not a valid OSS license,
> > so the GPL is no option.
>
> Where do you get the idea that the Debian maintainers feel the GPL is
> not a valid OSS license?  They've not maintained that either the GPL

The claims and GPL interpretations from initiators of the fork are in conflict 
with the OpenSource Definition from:

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

If you follow these claims, you first would need to remove the GPL from
the list of approved OSS licenses and later you would need to claim that
License combinations seen on Linux (e.g. a GPL program uses a LGPL libc)
cannot be legally distributed.

I however _do_ believe that the GPL is an an approved and valid OSS license and 
for this reason, there is no problem with the mentioned GPL LGPL combinations 
and of course with GPL and CDDL also.

I recommend you to read these articles:

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

They explain very detailed why there is no problem in cdrtools.

Note: I was part of the discussion in the 1980s that resulted in making the GPL
compliant with the reality. I thus know why GPL programs have been made compatible 
to any independend library under any license. 

BTW: The FSF of course knows about this fact and for this reason did not sue
Veritas for distributing a GNU tar derivate that was distributed together with
binary only closed source libraries it was linked against.

Jörg

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