cdrkit isoinfo and iso-info

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Mon Jul 27 20:54:05 UTC 2009


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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.
> 
Not including cdrecord is a valid choice. Putting another program with the same 
name and different code in seems pretty sleazy. It results in people sending 
Joerg questions and complaints (please don't pretend that the disclamer most 
people never see prevents this), and gives people who want to use the cli to 
burn media the false feeling that cdrecord is installed, when it's a hacked, 
obsolete version.

Is that clear enough? I don't care if it's not there, unless some other program 
pretends it is.

> 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.
> 
Anyone who reads the cdwrite list knows I'm not one of Joerg's fan-boys, he has 
an overly high ratio of ego to social skills, he dislikes Linux, but give him 
his due and don't hijack his application name.

How hard can it be to convert applications from cdrerord to totem? You don't 
even absolutely need source, IIRC you can edit the binary to change "cdrecord" 
to "usetotem" in the data section.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot




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