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. > The hard one is definitely cdrecord, which seems to be largely Joerg's work. > While it is purportedly released under the GPL, he seems to have no qualms > about threatening to sue people that he disagrees with, and if there are no > other copyright holders on cdrecord we don't have the safeguard of knowing > he's exposing himself to legal liability if he interferes with our exercise > of GPL-granted rights. It was released under GPL. He may change that for the future, and if we fork he may also make license statements that we arent allowed to merge code from him into our fork, but he cant really stop us from forking it, if we follow GPL. He can try, of course, but I dont think we would lose that battle. > 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. -- bye Joerg <wiggy> "Memory is like gasoline. You use it up when you are running. Of <wiggy> course you get it all back when you reboot..."; Actual explanation <wiggy> obtained from the Micro$oft help desk.
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