cdrkit isoinfo and iso-info

Antonio Olivares olivares14031 at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 24 23:37:42 UTC 2009




--- On Fri, 7/24/09, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> From: Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>
> Subject: Re: cdrkit isoinfo and iso-info
> To: "Antonio Olivares" <olivares14031 at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "encouragement and advice for using Fedora.Community assistance" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 4:19 PM
> On 07/25/2009 04:45 AM, Antonio
> Olivares wrote:
> 
> > Somewhat accurate, but problems were between between
> Debian/Debian packagers and Joerg.  The GPL was not
> helping out Joerg in anyway(like it is now forcing Micro$oft
> to release those 20,000 lines of code) and He(Joerg) decided
> that he needed a better license and moved to the CDDL which
> is/was a license setup by Sun.  People took advantage
> of code and were not held liable/responsible and the author
> took a different route.  This is why things happen like
> they do.  
> > 
> > As a matter of fact, some linux distributions still
> have original cdrtools in their distros and have no problems
> with anyone.  But this is another thing. 
> > 
> > In this situation and for the original poster, it
> would be recommended that he keep things as they are and not
> get into problems/incompatibilities.  cdrkit while not
> the original does a decent job, I like the comparision like
> Coke and Pepsi, I like to drink Coke, but if not available I
> can drink the Pepsi without troubles :)
> > 
> 
> We have had this discussion before and your understanding
> of the
> licensing issues remain incomplete. The cdrecord maintainer
> didn't move
> to CDDL completely. He cannot since he had accepted patches
> from others
> under the GPL license. If he had somehow moved to CDDL
> completely, there
> wouldn't be a problem. The fork was primarily forced due to
> the mixing
> of CDDL and GPL'ed files. cdrecord had licensing issues
> even before that
> but this pushed things over the edge. No mainstream binary
> distribution
> includes cdrecord anymore as a result of this problem. They
> simply cannot.
> 
> Microsoft violated the GPL license and then had to comply
> to avoid
> embarrassment and made a PR show out of it. Hardly the
> fault of the
> license.
> 
> Rahul
> 

You seem to show only one side of the argument.  The other side says this:

There is no license problem in the original cdrtools
Sun lawyers made a full legal review on the cdrtools package between August and November 2008 and did not find any license problem. 
Read more about the background in a few days. 
   
The Debian fork violates the GPL and the Urheberrecht
This is a list of violations in the Debian fork. It does not claim to be complete. The Urheberechtsgesetz will be named UrhG below. 
 The GPL preamble (see also Urheberrecht §14 below) disallows modifications in case they are suitable to affect the original author's reputation. As Debian installs symlinks with the original program names and as many people still believe that the symlinks with the original program names are the original software, Debian does not follow the GPL. 
 GPL §2a requires to keep track of any author and change date inside all changed files. This is not done in the fork. 
 GPL §2c requires modified programs to print Copyright messages as intended by the original author. This is not done in the fork wodim. 
 GPL §3 requires the complete source to be distributed if there is a binary distribution. The Debian fork tarball does not include everything needed to compile the cdrtools fork (complete source) and Debian does not give a written offer to deliver the missing parts. 
UrhG §13 requires redistributors to accept the way the author likes to mark his ownership. Debian removed such marks from the source of the fork against the will of the author and did ignore hints on this fact. 
UrhG §14 forbids modifications that may affect personal interests of the author in the work. Debian introduced such modifications as Debian knowingly introduced bugs that prevent use and changed the behavior in a way that makes the command line syntax non-portable and Debian still makes the work available under the original names.

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

Who is right?  
Can both sides be right?
I do not know, but a part of me feels bad because I truly don't understand the why part :(

Regards,

Antonio 


      




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