Re: xcdroast does no longer work with wodim: Who to blame?
On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 05:08:33PM -0800, Bill Unruh wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, James Vega wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 02:41:54PM -0800, Bill Unruh wrote:
>>> Thus, is it correct that the issue centers around mkisofs, a program which is
>>> under the GPL2 license and is linked with libscg, a CDDL licensed library? Is
>>> this where the dispute lies?
>>>
>>> If so, exactly what is the nature of the legal (as opposed to personal)
>>> disagreement? Schilling has made clear that he does not believe there to
>>> be any legal
>>> impediment to the distribution of the software. Debian has made clear that
>>> they believe that there is such an impediment. What, in as few words as
>>> possible, is the impediment?
>>
>> Read the CDDL section under the FSF's list of GPL incompatible licenses.
>
> I have. It says nothing except give the opinion that the two are incompatible
> ( as are GPL2 and GPL3). In particular it does not address the issue of
> exactly why, in the case of cdrtools, the linking of mkisofs and libscg makes
> the result undistributable.
> Ie, it is not very helpful in helping to resolve this dispute.
>
>>
>> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
>>
As was explained elsewhere in this thread (though I don't blame people
for missing it), the GPL mandates that additional restrictions may not
be applied to the code, and the CDDL contains restrictions (related to
patents) that the GPL does not. It's therefore not possible to
distribute something covered by both the GPL and the CDDL without
violating copyright law (unless one is the copyright holder).
Jörg Schilling, as I understand it, does not believe that the above
situation actually occurs, and that the CDDL-licenced and GPL-licenced
parts are entirely separate. Debian disagrees.
--
Benjamin M. A'Lee || mail: bma@subvert.org.uk
web: http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ || gpg: 0xBB6D2FA0
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