Hi, On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 00:18 +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: > John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote: > > > Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > > > > > > The fork distributed by Debian may however be called dubious: > > > > > > - The fork is in conflict with the Copyright law and thus may not be > > > legally distributed. > > > > If your code was Free Software, then it is perfectly legal for Debian to > > do what it does. > > It seems that you first need to learn what Free Software means and what > constraints the License and the Copyright law enforce. A Free software license > allows you to do many things, it does definitely not allow you what Debian did. While I personally do not use wodim, simply because wodim does not inspire much confidence with me being based on cdrecord, I have a few observations: 1. If your code was licensed correctly, and there wasn't concerns about it's quality, then nobody inside Debian would have forked it. 2. I am not convinced that there is any legal issue with the fork of cdrecord as wodim; it is clearly identified that it is a fork, and anything published describing problems with cdrecord would be the opinions of wodim's authors, not the Debian project itself, or the wodim project itself. As a result, no personal harm to your reputation has been done in the context of the Urheberrechtsgesetz[1] by the fork of cdrecord itself. As a result, it appears that your argument that the fork of cdrecord being illegal is actually invalid. 3. You might be taken more seriously at this point if you didn't act like a toddler. I'm just saying... every time this subject comes up, you show up and whine and whine and whine. It's doing you no good. Try something else, like improving cdrecord with your time instead of wasting it whining here. Please note that I haven't even tried wodim. I suspect it is not any better than cdrecord, and further I don't care. All of the burning apps I use are based around libburn, which seems to have a drama-free maintainer. I consider that to be a good thing, the fact that it supports more than just CD burning without any bogus license key-based closed-source "cdrecord-pro" software is a plus. [1] Everyone here should read the Urheberrechtsgesetz here http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/statutes/UrhG.htm and stop listening to Joerg's bollocks. He appears to be very misinformed. > > > If your code wasn't Free Software, then we wouldn't be using it in the > > first place. > > > ISTR that your code WAS free, but now isn't. > > The code that was taken by Debian for the fork WAS free but now it is no longer > because Debian did apply changes that are forbidden by law. What changes are those? Can you identify them? "All of them" is not a valid response here, just FYI. > > As you don't know what grants and what duties you have when dealing with free > software, please try to inform yourself. You may get into trouble if you change > things that are forbidden by law. I am pretty sure Eduard knows what he is doing. > > Let me quote the license person from the board of directors from the OpenSource > initiave: > > No OpenSource license gives you all grants you need to change anything > in the source. If the authors or Copyright holders of a software like, > they may always sue you. If you like to avoid being sued, play nicely > with the Copyright holders. Just because you can sue someone does not make their actions illegal. I can sue somebody for skipping a rock across a puddle in their own property, mind I would be laughed out of court for doing this, but I hope you see my point here. > > Eduard Bloch made a big mistake, he started a deffamation campaign against > cdrtools and Debian made the mistake to support Eduard Bloch. > > I don't know whether you are able to change the named mistake, but please note > that I am the copyright holder for the vast majority of the cdrtools code. I am > licensing the code and I am able to sue people for Copyright violations on the > code, Debian is not. If Debian claims they might be sued because of so called > license problems in the original software, this is just FUD. I am not > interested to sue people as long as there is a chance to have a solution that > does not need a court. If Debian however continues to attack me, Debian should > be aware that at some point I am forced to sue people for violating GPL and > Copyright law with the fork. > People who make threats should be fully prepared to deal with backlash from those threats. How will Fraunhofer handle such a public relations disaster? You may want to keep this in consideration before continuing with legal threats, as I am pretty sure that it will be all over slashdot, and Fraunhofer will likely be asked for a comment. > So let me ask: Is Debian willing to "play nicely" with me in the future or is > Debian interested in continuing the attacks? > > In case you don't know: My main interest is to make sure that the software I > write remains free and I am doing whaterver I need to ensure this. The license > change in cdrtools is a _reaction_ on the attacks from Eduard Bloch. So whom > does Debian support? Is it Eduard Bloch who is the initiator of the attacks or > is Debian interested rather in Free Software? > Please go away with your threats. We're tired of hearing about it. If you want people to play nice; you should be prepared to do so yourself. Instead all we see is temper-tantrums. If you want to work with the wodim team to resolve any conflicts, than you should employ some diplomacy to do so. Right now your behaviour does not seem very diplomatic; and I have failed to find any diplomatic contact between you and the wodim authors in the past. If I am wrong, please produce e-mails. As I see it, the problem here is *you*. So maybe *you* need to change your strategy. Because I am pretty sure that you do not scare anybody with these threats. > I am writing Free Software since 1982, this is much longer than Debian exists. > I support Freedom and if Debian is against Freedom, I cannot support Debian. > I find this statement patently absurd. You clearly do not support Freedom, as you are inhibiting on Debian's rights to distribute wodim. Hypocrite. > Jörg > > -- > EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin > js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) > joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ > URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily > >
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