On Tuesday 2009 January 06 06:17:49 Paul Cartwright wrote: > On Tue January 6 2009, Joerg Schilling wrote: > > >Are you sure it it using the "new cdrecord"? > > > > What do you understand by "new cdrecord"? > > I don't think I knew all of that, thanks for the background. Why do people > always have to mess with something that is working!! Joerg doesn't like wodim, because he doesn't really believe people should be able to fork his code. (He is the primary developer of cdrecord.) His assertion that wodim violates the GPL and Germany's "Author's Rights" (I can't spell the original German word.) does not appear to be supported by precident or even trained legal analysis of the specifics. I don't think wodim can be reasonably held to hurt Joerg's reputation or integrity. Providing symlinks from the old binary names to the new ones, and giving similar output are, in fact, required for interoperability. That said, wodim was forked from a "really old" version of cdrecord (the last version that was clearly licensed under the GPL). Of course, browsing Joerg's site shows you that cdrecord hasn't had a stable release in 4.5 years and wodim had a stable release 2 months ago. Wodim certainly had and has it's share of issues, but so has cdrecord. If either (a) you don't intend to distribute cdrecord OR (b) you agree with Joerg's interpretation of the GPL, I strongly encourage you to install cdrecord from Joerg's site. If it works and wodim doesn't, there's clearly a bug in wodim, and you should file one. IMO, Joerg interpretation is incorrect as he assumes "source code" (which is a defined phrase in the GPL) means something other than what it is defined to mean. IANADD, but I read the archives: debian-legal also doesn't agree with Joerg's interpretation of the GPL and is "in the business" of distributing software. They feel that distributing binaries of cdrecord produced from the source after the fork is not allowed by copyright law, and would expose Debian to legal action. However, they would like to continue providing cdburning software to Debian users. Since Debian could not convince Joerg to change the licensing to something they felt they could distribute, they had to begin a project to make cdburning software, which brought us wodim. Personally, I use wodim and will continue to use it, because I don't doubt it's status as free software. I have some doubt that cdrecord is free software; I don't doubt Joerg intends it to be free software, but I think his particular love of the CDDL causes problems. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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