Re: Bug#218073: ITP: dvdrtools -- DVD writing program

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 03:35:41PM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> >       * Begin restricted code for quality assurance. 
> >         * 
> >         * Warning: you are not allowed to modify or to remove the 
> >         * Copyright and version printing code below! 
> >         * 
> >         * If you modify cdrecord you need to include additional version 
> >         * printing code that: 
> >         * 
> >         *      -       Clearly states that the current version is an 
> >         *              inofficial (modified) version and thus may have bugs 
> >         *              that are not present in the original. 
> >         * 
> >         *      -       Print your e-mail address and tell people that you 
> >         *              will do complete support for this version of cdrecord. 
> >         * 
> >         *      -       Tell the users not to ask the original author for 
> >         *              help. 

> > I'm not sure at all this is GPL-compatible or DFSG-compliant. Does
> > someone already look into that question?
> > One thing is sure, it has nothing to do with GPL 2c.

This is certainly not DFSG-free: requiring me to provide complete support
for a release in order to distribute modified versions isn't free at all.
(It's GPL-incompatible, too, but although the cdrecord and dvdrtools
source packages contain several GPL components, none of them appear to
actually be linked to the problematic code.)

I don't know if requiring me to include my email address is DFSG-free.

I don't know if these terms are free to the FSF--note that dvdrtools uses
GNU Savannah.

Requiring that I display a copyright notice and license blurb is OK, but
requiring that I not modify the code that does so is not.  This even
prevents me from fixing the output: "cdrecord -version" displays garbage
ISO-8859-1 on my UTF-8 terminal.

-- 
Glenn Maynard