On Mon Mar 02 22:36, Bill Unruh wrote: > Are you claiming that he does/did not have the right to release the major > portion of the code under CDDL? (ie those portions that he did release in that > way?) Ie, that he did not have the permission of those other copyright holders > to thus release the code? Merely stating, I believe, that he would _need_ all of those other copyright holders to relicesce their sections of the work in the same manner each time he wants to change the licence and so saying that he is the sole copyright holder is a slight simplification. Speaking as a dbus contributor, which recently tried to relicense, it's really quite hard to get hold of everyone in order to do this (we failed). This is why the FSF insist you grant them the copyright on any patches you submit. >> The problem is fairly clear; the combination of GPLed and CDDLed code >> is not distributable. Whether Joerg will agree with that statement of >> the problem is unlikely, but that's not really our problem anymore. > > This is again far too broad a statement. Debian does distribute a > combination of GPL and many other code licenses which are not GPL-- if > they apply to separate and different programs. I am trying to narrow > down the problem. So again, is the issue the linking of mkisofs with > libscg? The problem is with the linking. Debian is allowed to ship non-linked CDDL (or other) software on the same media as GPL software (the 'mere aggregation' clause) and link GPL fundamental system libraries such as libc to non-GPL software (the 'system libraries' clause), but it is not allowed to link anything against GPL software unless the resulting work as a whole can be distributed under the terms of the GPL. This means that works licensed under the BSD, MIT, expat etc licences can be linked against GPL works because they can be distributed under the terms of the GPL without violating their own terms of distribution. You cannot distribute a CDDL work under the terms of the GPL without violating its licence. As you say, most of cdrecord is pure CDDL and there is no issue with that at all (assuming the above agreement of all copyright holders. As you say, we generally have to trust upstreams about this). The issue is specifically with the combination of a GPL-only mkisofs with a CDDL-only libscg. If Jorg were to dual-license either of them (again, see relicensing) then we could distribute the result under the terms of whichever licence they shared (and it doesn't really matter which). However, I'll repeat the clause that this would merely make it possible for us to distribute. It still requires a maintainer who will work with Jorg, who has been hostile in the past about things like patching his software and working with the Linux kernel rather than insisting everything be done like solaris. Debian routinely patches software it ships for many reasons and this is unlikely to change with cdrecord. Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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