Re: Processed: Forwarding to the technical committee
On 4/4/06, Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:
> Yes, unfortunately I trust judges to be uninformed enough to have true
> randomness in decisions. I personally would think you can't revoke GPL
> for a old version, only if you release a new one use a different license
> for that, but well...
I don't think the license is the issue here.
If the code has been released under the GPL (with proper
copyright notices and everything), then we have every
right to modify it, and to distribute the modifications.
The issue, here, is the potential for spurious legal harassment.
On the plus side, harassing legal activities cost money, and
create legal risks for the person engaging in them. This tends
to limit their use.
On the down side, the energies spent defending against
such activities could be more fruitful if spent in other
areas.
Do we have a test suite of software, to check that these
cdrtools are working properly? Because, if we had a
good test suite, it wouldn't be hard to re-implement from
scratch. (The hard part of re-implementing from scratch
is finding and tracking down all the little bits and pieces
that don't work quite right for somebody's special case.)
--
Raul
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