Re: cdrecord: weird GPL interpretation
Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 11:18:11AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> I see this as a similar circumstance to Pine. UW had very clearly
>> given a free license, then switched to a loopy interpretation where we
>> didn't have a license to distribute modified versions. So it got
>> pulled from main. They changed their license for future versions --
>> sure, they called it a clarification, but it was a pretty big change.
>> But Debian doesn't distribute that old pine, because -- even when the
>> copyright holder has gone insane -- it's polite to accede to their
>> wishes.
>>
>> The same action is appropriate here.
>
> If the situation is the way you've described (that the previous Pine
> license was free), I think the same action was inappropriate then.
The previous pine license was clearly and unambiguously free. UW, the
copyright holder, devised an interpretation which was non-free.
Debian deferred to the copyright holder's interpretation in that case.
There's an additional problem: cdrtools, at least as Debian
distributes it, uses some code for which Schilling is not the
copyright holder. The HFS support, for example, is copyright Robert
Leslie, and licensed under the normal, sanely interpreted GPL.
cdrecord is not distributable by anybody, including Schilling, in this
state.
> If things are the way you described, we put the priorities of our users
> and of the free software community below the priorities of someone else.
No, we put the priority of our users to have kewl warez below the
priority to keep our users safe from lawsuits.
> That said, if there were other reasons (for example, perhaps there were
> critical bugs in the free code that no one wanted to fix, or perhaps
> there was no free code), then the situation is different.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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