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Cdrtools licensing (was Re: Processed: Forwarding to the technical committee)



On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 11:00:16PM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
>On 10614 March 1977, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
>> It's my understanding that Joerg Schilling is not the original author of
>> mkisofs, and is definitely not the exclusive copyright holder.  If earlier
>> contributors released their work under the GPL, I'm not the least bit
>> worried about Joerg suppressing a fork.
>
>Correct, mkisofs was initially written by someone else. JS claims that
>there is not that much code left, but I doubt that he could relicense it
>as he likes it.

Yup; if needs be, we could even go back to an ancient version before
Joerg got involved and fork from there.

>> As far as not being able to fully replace cdrtools, though, freedom is not
>> always convenient; and we have promised that Debian will remain free.  If we
>> have to excise his code from Debian, it's pretty clear that it will be a
>> while before CD burning is again as convenient as it is today, but I don't
>> see that it's avoidable if the copyright holder is not acting in good faith
>> towards distributions he takes a personal dislike to.
>
>Well. He did like Debian the most of the distributions until recently
>(where that Bug came up), as we did only very minimal changes to his
>code. Seems like one of the last patches, which changed libscg a bit,
>made him also angry a bit, but overall it was ok.

There's a long history of hostility from JS towards several of the
distros and the Linux kernel developers; he has a very abrasive style
of "discussion" and seems very rarely (if ever) capable of admitting
mistakes.

There was some talk quite a while ago between the cdrtools maintainers
in several of the large distros about working together to maintain
patches and/or a fork, but it bogged down due to lack of time - see
freedrtools.freedesktop.org for more details.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me 

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