Re: cdrtools

[Joerg Schilling <schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de>]

Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:

> On 10742 March 1977, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>
> Reply-To and M-f-T set to my address, whoever answers please respect
> this and let this thread die on -devel, its the wrong medium for this
> discussion, thank you.

If we did agree on continuing the mail exchange on a private base, there
youle be not problem, but unfortunately, you did send some lies in your mail 
that need to be corrected first....


> > I am sorry, but I cannot believe that you like to make serious proposal
> > with the text you wrote.
>
> Do you believe anything thats not written by you is serious?

This looks confused.

If you do not make a serious proposal you cannot expect that people would
take you for serious.


> > Let me make a proposal that makes sense for now and the future:
> > 1)	Throw out Eduard Bloch. He has been the biggest problem for Debian
> > 	in the past years. Find a new maintainer with the following properties:
>
> I know that you cant work with him (and he with you).

I am willing and able to cooperate with any reasonable person.

Eduard Bloch has absolutely no clue and on the other side implicitely claims 
in his arrogant habbit that he knows more about cdrtools than I do. This makes 
it impussoble to cooperate with him. 


> > 2)	Update to a recent cdrtools source, do not hide interesting 
> > 	new features from Debian users and (this may be even more important to
> > 	Linux users) workarounds for recent Linux kernel 
> > 	self-incompatibilities. 
>
> You combine CDDL and GPL, and that doesnt work, the two are
> incompatible. The CDDL is intended to be GPL incompatible. If you
> dont believe that - even people from Sun, like Simon Phipps and Danese
> Cooper (now working at Intel, but one of the authors of CDDL) are aware
> of the incompatibility of the two licenses, and Simon and Danese also
> said at this years Debian Conference that this is intended. (We had both
> Simon and Danese there, talking with us about different things including
> the CDDL). They stated that the GPL incompatibility is *part of the
> design of the CDDL*

Claiming that Sun did make the CDDL incompatible with the GPL is a deliberate 
lie. 

The rest of your claims from above include several other untrue assertions:

-	You claim wrong authors: the authors of the CDDL are Claire Giordano (a 
	lawyer) and Andy Tucker (the former chief engineer for OpenSolaris).

-	You claim that Simon Phipps sayd at this Debian Conference that
	"an incompatibility was intended". This is definitely not true, I did
	ask him in a private mail and he replied that he did not say more than
	that he believes that there are some issues.

	I am sorry, but it easier to believe him than to believe you.

-	The general claim that "The CDDL is intended to be GPL incompatible."
	is definitely not true:

	I had a long private talk (~ 3 hours) with Andy Tucker (in September 2004 
	at a joint dinner) and I had a 1.5 hour phone call with Claire Giordano and
	Andy Tucker in December 2004.

	Since that time I know that Sun had/has no such intention.

	Andy did tell me that it makes absolutely no sense, trying to forbid 
	that the OpenSolaris code may be used in other OS. The only rules for 
	creating the CDDL have been to allow Sun Solaris to be build on top of
	OpenSolaris and that the license has a strong copyleft.

	Also note: the result of the phone call with Claire Giordano and Andy 
	Tucker was that 3 of 4 changes on the CDDL text made in January 2005
	have been done on my requests. If Debian people did have issues with
	the first CDDL draft, they could have done like me. As they did not,
	it is obvious that Debian peole have no problems with the CDDL.
 

I am not sure who did start spreading the FUD about "intended incompatibility",
but many Sun people who definitely know better are willing to answer questions 
about the CDDL in order to avoid rumors about the CDDL.




> And if thats not enough, its not only Debian or Sun stating it, its also
> FSF, which you can read on http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
> - the relevant text there is:
>
> --8<------------------------schnipp------------------------->8---
> Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
>
> This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has
> some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. It
> requires that all attribution notices be maintained, while the GPL only
> requires certain types of notices. Also, it terminates in retaliation
> for certain aggressive uses of patents. So, a module covered by the GPL
> and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We
> urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
>
> Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term "intellectual
> property"
> --8<------------------------schnapp------------------------->8---


Sorry, but I do not believe people that put things into a GPL FAQ that
are obviously wrong. Let me give a single example to avoid wasting too much 
time:

The FSF GPL FAQ e.g. incorrectly claims:

	Linking ABC statically or dynamically with other modules is making a 
	combined work based on ABC. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU
        General Public License cover the whole combination.

The GPL does not contain the term "combined work", so this is an invalid claim.

The GPL rather talks about a "derived work" and simply linking two modules 
together does definitely not make module B a "derived work" of module A
if module A calls code from module B but module B does not call code from
module A.


I am willing to have a private discussion in case it would make sense and will 
not be a waste of time. This means that I will immediately stop the discussion 
in case that you e.g. again claim that Sun did make the CDDL incompatible to 
the GPL by intention or that you quote the GPL incorrectly in hope to "prove"
claims about the incompatibility of the CDDL and the GPL.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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