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Re: xcdroast does no longer work with wodim: Who to blame?



On Mon, 02 Mar 2009, Bill Unruh wrote:
> Are you claiming that he does/did not have the right to release the
> major portion of the code under CDDL?

He has the ability to release the portions that he has the copyright
to under any license he wishes. He doesn't have the right to put code
that he does not own the copyright to under another license; that's
reserved to the copyright holders of that code.

> Ie, that he did not have the permission of those other copyright
> holders to thus release the code?

If he has not been specifically granted permission by the other
copyright holders, he does not have the right to relicense their code.
If he has been specifically granted this permission, there is no
evidence of it in any of the material available to me. Considering
Joerg Schilling's continued stance on this matter, I personally feel
that accepting his word in this regard exposes Debian to liability
from copyright holders unecessarily, and I suspect a substantial
number of Debian Developers feel similarly.

This may seem unfair to those who have not watched hundreds of
person-hours being expended on this issue, but going back through the
archives of the discussions where all of this has been hashed out in
depth should be enlightening.

> 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.

Any combination of a GPLed work and a work under a license which is
incompatible with the GPL such that the combination must be
distributed under the terms of the GPL is not distributable by Debian.
Parts of cdrtools are only licensed under the GPL, and are combined
with parts that are licensed only under a license which is
incompatible with the GPL.

> So again, is the issue the linking of mkisofs with libscg?

This is one of the issues, but not the only issue, as I've pointed out
repeatedly. Even if it was the only issue, it's still enough to make
cdrtools non-distributable in Debian.


Don Armstrong

NB: please obey the list code of conduct, and refrain from Cc:'ing me.
-- 
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic
 -- Terry Pratchett

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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