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Debian bug report for this issue

Tell them what you think by mailing 354622@bugs.debian.org

Debian's problem has always been that its handlers place users and the usability of their distribution far below very petty internal arguments intended to frame the distro as some sort of legal pioneer

Debian did not choose this battle. They have been distributing Firefox for years in the same way they distribute other open source software. It was Mozilla who forced the issue by threatening legal action if Debian doesn't change the name or start submitting all patches (even security patches) to Mozilla for permission before they are applied. Mike Conner of Mozilla says "you should consider this, as I previously said, notice that your usage of the trademark is not permitted in this way, and we are expecting a resolution. If your choice is to cease usage of the trademark rather than bend the [Debian Free Software Guidelines] a little, that is your decision to make."

Debian asked "could we at least get a stay of execution? Etch is going into deep freeze in less than a month. Would it be possible to resolve this after the release?" and Mozilla responded that "If we were forced to revoke your permission to use the trademark, freeze state would not matter, you would be required to change all affected packages as soon as possible. Its not a nice thing to do, but we would do it if necessary, and we have done so before."

Many legal squabbles are instigated by Debian, but this isn't one of them. Mozilla has forced the issue. Linux Weekly News wrote a good summary of the situation.

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org

The difference is that Debian's open use logo includes the word Debian.
http://www.debian.org/logos/openlogo-100.png

And also, Debian isn't threatening legal action against people who produce customized versions of Debian. If you use ever use Ubuntu, you've probably noticed how many packages and configuration scripts refer to themselves as "The Debian suchandsuch". Debian (as far as I know) is not pursuing legal remedies to stop this.

I'm not arguing that no distributions behave the way Mozilla is, however. A good example of a distribution that is behaving in this manner is Red Hat. That is why CentOS and others have to be careful of removing all Red Hat references in their product.

Debian, on the other hand, does not make life so difficult for everyone else.

Debian really needs to get the stick out of their ass. It's a great server distro, but if they want any sort of desktop marketshare then they have to change. Ubuntu better tell Debian to shove it and include the logo and Firefox as Moz wants them too otherwise you're just going to confuse people. Not everyone wants to read Wiki's and forums to figure out that the browser they have is indeed Firefox.

Clearly your goals are not the same as Debian's goals. Debian's primary goal is to provide a free distribution, governed by the Debian Social Contract. It has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with desktop use, or server use, and any benefits in those areas are good spinoffs but not the highest priorities. There's clearly support for this goal, and if there isn't enough then it'll fail and people will use other distros. Meanwhile, perhaps you should just not use Debian if you're not concerned about its primary goal. If you want to criticise, then maybe focus on a distribution whose goals you actually care about.

Debian really needs to get the stick out of their ass. It's a great server distro, but if they want any sort of desktop marketshare then they have to change. Ubuntu better tell Debian to shove it and include the logo and Firefox as Moz wants them too otherwise you're just going to confuse people. Not everyone wants to read Wiki's and forums to figure out that the browser they have is indeed Firefox.

Clearly your goals are not the same as Debian's goals. Debian's primary goal is to provide a free distribution, governed by the Debian Social Contract. It has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with desktop use, or server use, and any benefits in those areas are good spinoffs but not the highest priorities. There's clearly support for this goal, and if there isn't enough then it'll fail and people will use other distros. Meanwhile, perhaps you should just not use Debian if you're not concerned about its primary goal. If you want to criticise, then maybe focus on a distribution whose goals you actually care about.

Read the bug report. Mozilla Corporation wants to...

1. review every patch to Firefox that Debian makes before it goes live.
2. prevent Debian from backporting patches from newer Firefox releases to older ones.

As a reminder, Debian's policy is to not make major software changes in stable. You can probably see where there's a problem here.

In order to get their way, Mozilla Corporation is threatening Debian with copyright and trademark issues. Not just copyright issues on the logo itself, but trademark issues with the name "Firefox."

Because Debian really cares about freedom, and the existence of the non-free repositories is a minor necessary evil. There have been a debate in the Debian community about whether removing non-free. In the end it was decided to keep it for the moment, for the Debian Social Contract states Debian's priority is its users.

So for Debian renaming Firefox and keeping it completely free is a much better option than moving it to non-free.

It's modded funny, but I actually think it's merely cynical. The actual discussion is an extremely interesting, if sometimes frustrating, read: say what you like about Debian's legal pedantry, the thread certainly doesn't reveal Mozilla in a favourable light. For me it really brings home the value of freedom: there are obviously big corporate pressures trying to pull Mozilla in one direction, but thanks to Freedom-with-a-capital-F, Debian are fully able to resist, even if it comes down to the desperate step of renaming Firefox.

Well, the Debian people are "rabid zealots", in a way - a good way. They care about freedom and they don't back down. If you, or anyone else, doesn't like that, you are free to use another distro. Debian's attitude towards freedom is one of the reasons I use Debian.

Also, this kind of thing is nothing new in Debian. For example, they had huge arguments over whether the Gnu Free Documentation License was free enough (They decided it wasn't, with the exception of GFDL documents that have no invariant sections).

You can read the discussion in the bug report.

I'm not a Debian user & do use many Mozilla products, but I think MozCo could have handled this better.

The logo is under a non-permissive copyright, which Debian objects to & which Mozilla has always defended from others using in "non-official" builds (including in Gentoo and the "optimized" builds for Windows and Mac by fans in the forums). These builds used a generic logo (the blue globe of the official logo, but without the orange firefox) or made their own logo.

Debian was granted permission to use the trademarked name and not the logo, but this was later rescinded.

While MozCo is perfectly within their rights to do this, they could have been a better player--no one (not even Debian) objects to the trademarked name or logo. But The COPYRIGHT on the logo runs contrary to the DFSG. Furthermore, MozCo can police their trademarks as they wish--I'm aware of no law which would require them to require the use of the image whenever the name is also used. So why did they change their minds as to what is permissable?

Furthermore, Debian has been backporting security fixes to older releases. MozCo encouraged them to use only the newer version (as Red Hat and Novell apparently do now) & said that this backporting would not be workable with the new trademark policy.

Here is a link to the thread on debian's bugzilla:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=3 54622

The trademark problems discussed make the issue pretty clear.

Agreed. I find it ironic that Debian also has restrictions on their copyrighted logos. See: http://www.debian.org/logos/

/K

i am in the market for a new player and was actually considering this, until "At least in the initial release, Zune's Wi-Fi won't connect to a network. It's peer-to-peer only."

I suspect the patch to make it a fully capable machine will be found at http://www.debian.org/>here soon enough.

Debian is Trademarked

At first, I chose to use JavaScript to script my PocketPC application, because it was the most obvious "consumer oriented" scripting language, with a free implementation in C (SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, built into Firefox and many other applications).

It worked, but it was big and slow. And it was a pain in the ass to interface with C and C++, because SWIG doesn't support it, and it has a really nasty extension API. But I didn't realize how truly horrible it was, until I saw how bad SpiderMonkey JavaScript ranked in the Computer Language Shootout. It's not just the worst, it's MORE THAN TWICE AS BAD as the second worst!

What amazes me about SpiderMonkey JavaScript, is that it manages to be magnificently slow AND waste huge amounts of memory, without actually getting any benefits from all the trade-offs and compromises it made!

It's not just at the bottom of the list of the computer language shootout ranking, it's waaaaay below the next worst language: more than twice as bad, in fact!

Last place SpiderMonkey's ratio to C is 26, while next to last place Smalltalk GST's ratio is 12, so SpiderMonkey's 2.25 times worse than the slowest Smalltalk! (That's with a 1 multiplier for full cpu time and memory use, to consider both.)

In contrast, Lua is the fastest scripting language in the shootout. In a head-to-head comparison with JavaScript, Lua totally smokes JavaScript and leaves it in the dust, with some benchmarks scoring as high as 71, 77, 80 times better than JavaScript.

Lua's an extremely well designed and implemented language, very clean and simple, few compromises and blemishes, excellent licensing terms, very easy to integrate with C and C++ with SWIG and other tools, has few dependencies, runs everywhere, and it's even easy to learn, read and write.

Lua already existed (in an early form) by the time Netscape started kludging together LiveScript then renaming it JavaScript. It would be a better world if Netscape had decided to use Lua instead of inventing their own half-assed language, and getting distracted by the Java Juggernaut.

But in spite of that dot-com-bubble diversion, Lua has finally proven itself, and is extremely popular in the game industry, widely used in games like World of Warcraft. A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.

-Don

At first, I chose to use JavaScript to script my PocketPC application, because it was the most obvious "consumer oriented" scripting language, with a free implementation in C (SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, built into Firefox and many other applications).

It worked, but it was big and slow. And it was a pain in the ass to interface with C and C++, because SWIG doesn't support it, and it has a really nasty extension API. But I didn't realize how truly horrible it was, until I saw how bad SpiderMonkey JavaScript ranked in the Computer Language Shootout. It's not just the worst, it's MORE THAN TWICE AS BAD as the second worst!

What amazes me about SpiderMonkey JavaScript, is that it manages to be magnificently slow AND waste huge amounts of memory, without actually getting any benefits from all the trade-offs and compromises it made!

It's not just at the bottom of the list of the computer language shootout ranking, it's waaaaay below the next worst language: more than twice as bad, in fact!

Last place SpiderMonkey's ratio to C is 26, while next to last place Smalltalk GST's ratio is 12, so SpiderMonkey's 2.25 times worse than the slowest Smalltalk! (That's with a 1 multiplier for full cpu time and memory use, to consider both.)

In contrast, Lua is the fastest scripting language in the shootout. In a head-to-head comparison with JavaScript, Lua totally smokes JavaScript and leaves it in the dust, with some benchmarks scoring as high as 71, 77, 80 times better than JavaScript.

Lua's an extremely well designed and implemented language, very clean and simple, few compromises and blemishes, excellent licensing terms, very easy to integrate with C and C++ with SWIG and other tools, has few dependencies, runs everywhere, and it's even easy to learn, read and write.

Lua already existed (in an early form) by the time Netscape started kludging together LiveScript then renaming it JavaScript. It would be a better world if Netscape had decided to use Lua instead of inventing their own half-assed language, and getting distracted by the Java Juggernaut.

But in spite of that dot-com-bubble diversion, Lua has finally proven itself, and is extremely popular in the game industry, widely used in games like World of Warcraft. A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.

-Don

Get:1 http://ftp.debian.org/ unstable/main libssl0.9.7 0.9.7k-1 [2279kB]

1) It's no longer the case that technical ability and know-how is enough. Software Patents and other legal issues are causing people like rms to consider whether it's even feasible at all to be a developer, unless something is done to push back against the US/international law criminalizing software development, free or unfree. It will mean absolutely nothing when you're talented and knowledgable enough to write/compile your own compiler/OS, but trying to connect a Non-Trusted-Group approved device to any network becomes a felony, punishable by multiple life sentances. It'll be equally worthless to know how to 'roll your own' linux distro when all computer programming tools(the ones that aren't covered by over-broad, obvious, ignorant of prior art patents) require a license much like firearms do in some countries prohibiting nearly everyone from using them.

2) Apt does source, wtf.

I use Debian because it's easy and it works. Because of that AMD 64 looks like a cheap and practical platform for my next computer. I'll wait and see what things look like under core duo, but I doubt it will be a contender anytime soon for software and hardware reasons. New stuff is almost always a huge pain in the neck for me. It also costs more. Like I said, right now I can get into an AMD64 system for under $200 and reuse my existing components. Moving to core duo, right now, will cost me a whole new system. This might change as the older AMD 64 platforms sell out and become unavailable but by then the cost of AMD 64 two will have dropped and DDR2 memory is better.

I mentioned it because this test did not clearly establish any performance benefit that I might actually see. Tests performed with non free drivers don't mean anything to me.

I'm interested in AMD 64 because Debian has had a full port for a year now. When Etch goes stable, AMD 64 will be even more interesting.

It's much nicer to report bugs to folks who genuinely want to receive the reports and want their packages to work.

and it lives up to the Debian standard of reliable running, even in testing.

They've got a nice fully functioning gui net installer for etch that worked perfectly for me on a Dell 2300 server with raided SCSI drives. I did a basic LAMP+desktop install. They changed the default sshd install to use keys. (as in public key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts file) Excellent! I'm looking forward to finding more of my usual security tweeks configured as default.

It's testing, so the usual security warnings apply.

I think that there may be a little more sense of urgency at the Debian project with some legitimate competition from deep-pockets Shuttleworth. My etch install suggests they are responding with better product and new ideas to accelerate the development pace.

Install it today! http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

They already started. There's a debian userland with NetBSD kernel and NetBSD userland with a debian kernel in the works. It hasn't been updated in a while but the project tree is still there: Debian NetBSD.

If I don't want perl or jpg in my imagemagick

If I don't want perl or jpg in my imagemagick

The fact that Apple is running out of suckers does not surprise me.

Commodity/standard/cheap hardware + GNU/Linux = you win!

Ouch ;)

It's not paticularly easy at this point, but any experianced Linux geek should be able to figure it out in a evening. Use a lightweight VM.

Not like Xen of VMware, but a lightweight container virtualization system like Linux-jail, Vserver, or OpenVZ.

1. So setup a chroot jail or one of those OpenVZ or whatnot.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/vserver-howto.xml for example.

2. Install Debian Testing via Debootstrap. A minimal install is about 250 megs or so. You can reduce it further.
Here is how to install Debian from any Linux distro, this guide is for AMD64 in paticular, but it'll be about the same for any support arch.
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.amd64/apds0 3.html

2b. If you want a 'deleteable' setup use UnionFS (ala Knoppix) to setup a read-only file system and then a layered rw file system over that. Setup everything on the Read-only portion how you like it then just purge the rw version periodicly.
http://www.am-utils.org/project-unionfs.html

3. Install all your favorite apps and such that you use to interact with the internet, browser, email, IM, etc in your deb install.

4. start up the VM container, setup ssh keys so you can ssh in without a password (but obviously you don't want to be able to ssh back out without a password.

4b. Setup a shared folder like ~/Downloads so you can access files from your container outside of that container. Maybe use mount --bind to do that.

5. Run your internet-accessing applications from that a ssh session in a xterm, or from scripts from application launchers.

The worst a hacker could do would be to take over that VM and maybe setup a file server or whatnot as a user, or maybe issue a fork bomb to try to DOS your system. A purge of the 'rw portion' will fix that.

May I ask what you do with over 5GB?

I routinely use 20-30 GB/month, and that's when I don't use BitTorrent. 5 GB/week would keep me pretty much perpetually bandwidth-limited.

How many Linux distributions can you download and USE in one day?

The last Debian release alone was 8.5 GB, and that's only for i386. Source code is another 8.8 GB. (These links are for reference only, if you want to download Debian CD/DVDs, go here to avoid flooding the kernel.org mirror.)

On top of that, you'll probably want to download a live CD such as Knoppix.

But to partly answer your question, I've recently downloaded 5 distros in one day. It was 3 different versions of Mandriva (which is a terribly-designed OS, IMHO), Fedora Core 5, and Knoppix. Coincidently, it was because I was doing some work my university hired me to do (though I don't live on campus).

Personally, though, I'm not sure that all students in residence should be required to pay for more bandwidth than is reasonably considered necessary for their education, so 5 GB/week is probably fine as a baseline, as long as:

1. No punitive actions are taken for exceeding this bandwidth. (Just throttle the connection once usage gets too high, which will happen legitimately from time to time);
2. The traffic is metered outside the local network (local traffic is exempt); and
3. Individual students have the option of paying for better service at a rate comparable to what is offered by high-speed Internet providers in the local area. Alternatively, students could have the option of getting third-party high-speed service to supplement the baseline service provided by the university.

Basically, people in university residences should have access to decent bandwidth, but it doesn't necessarily need to be provided automatically.

Debian already supports Hurd and FreeBSD kernels; they could do a NetBSD one as well.

http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/

It's a shame apt-get doesn't have something like a switch to select between "guaranteed stable", "probably stable", and "bleeding edge".

You can do that, but it takes a more sophisticated user and some reading to figure out. (Something I've been too lazy to do.) apt-get has a -t flag that lets you choose which distribution to grab from (e.g. apt-get -t unstable install package). There's also something called pinning, where you edit your sources.list and assign different values to different distributions. I know Knoppix makes use of this to do a mix of stable, testing, and unstable packages. There's a bit of an explanation of it here. If you have multiple distributions in your sources.list, synaptic lets you choose which available version of a package you want as well.

That being said, I've never tried these things myself, so I don't know if mixing distributions leads to dependency hell or what. Maybe it's great, maybe a huge pain.

So these chips are 95% compatible with MIPS? What exactly does that mean? What did they do, grab the entire Debian MIPS project and hack it from there? If so, wouldn't the GPL require the code to be released? (Yeah, I know, I wondering whether the Chinese government is willing to respect the GPL.)

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/exampl es/_vimrc

which will automatically encode/decode .gpg files. If you're daring that is.

I swear I hit the preview button...

there will always ALWAYS be a place for the determined to find software for free.

Yup. There always will be.

What are you, an old COBOL programmer who hates to learn new languages? Lua is an extremely well designed language, much more efficient than PHP or Ruby. Where did you get the prejudice that a high level game programming language would be designed for people who can't master other languages? Ruby shines because it's a real programming language, not a toy, and it integrates extremely well with compiled languages like C and C++.

I understand that you may not have heard of Lua, because there are a lot of people like you who are afraid to learn new languages, and reject them out of hand, without even knowing what you're talking about. But if you have the guts to open your mind to new ideas, then take a look at the computer language shootout, and see which interpreted scripting language is at the top of the pack, with a higher score than JavaScript, Smalltalk GST, Scheme MzScheme, PHP, Smalltalk Visualworks, Ruby, Icon, TCL, Pike, Mozart/OZ, Perl, Erlang Hipe, Python and Scala. Ever heard of any of those languages, old timer? Lua's faster than them all.

-Don

Lua totally kicks Ruby's ass in the Computer Language Shootout.

Ruby only seems like a great language to newbie programmers who don't know anything but PHP. It's not BAD, but it's not very impressive nor efficient compared to decent languages, and it's horrible compared to excellent languages.

-Don

Lua totally kicks Ruby's ass in the Computer Language Shootout.

Ruby only seems like a great language to newbie programmers who don't know anything but PHP. It's not BAD, but it's not very impressive nor efficient compared to decent languages, and it's horrible compared to excellent languages.

-Don

Why is Ruby so far down at the bottom of the list sorted by score, in the Computer Language Shootout? The only other popular web server scripting language that's worse than Ruby is PHP! That's certainly nothing to be proud of.

With such lackluster performance, Ruby looks good to newbie programmers whose only experience is with PHP, but that's only because PHP is so horrible that Ruby looks better in contrast, and they haven't investigated any of the much more efficient, fully developed, well designed languages like Lisp, Python and Lua, which kick Ruby's ass when it comes to performance.

But if your main criteria for choosing a language is that it should only have a single one-size-fits-all unitard web framework, and you don't like the bewildering freedom of having many frameworks to choose from tailored for different situations, then by all means go with Ruby on Rails, and save yourself all the bother and effort of researching and understanding the problem space, and choosing the best tool to fit your application. After all, it levels the Web 2.0 playing field if everybody's trying to tighten their screws and splice their wires with the same hammer.

The fact that Sun hired a major developer of a programming language does NOT necessarily bode well for that language. Sun has a long track record of trying to scuttle technologies that they perceive as a threat, by hiring the developers, and diverting them to work on other things like Java.

-Don

Surely a FLOSS community, anyway? Debian hardly make the role of free software seem insignificant against its media friendly cousin, 'open source' - in fact, Debian is one of the few distributions out there that actively recognises the system as GNU with Linux.

Etch is what I'm using, which is why I posted those screenshots. Even so, Sarge has task-based package selection as well, so the parent's comment is still just FUD.

...only a fraction of the Linux downloads that are happening end up being actual installs.

Intersting point, however, I think that only applies to people looking for a desktop OS at home. For example, take a look at the list of educational institutions that use Debian. Read the reports; some people are installing Debian on a lot of machines, and you can bet that they aren't downloading an installer image for each computer.

Is Bill Gates planning an invasion of Canada? I know his "Trusted Computing" initiative is designed to eliminate choices, but will that junk really work?

...but if you're using Debian, I would highly recommend that you spend a quality week or two *READING* the wonderful documentation debian has and read / ask a few questions on their mailing lists.

Once you understand the package-management system of the SOFTWARE YOU ARE BASING YOUR BUSINESS OFF OF, the answer to your question will become clear... nay- simple.

  - MyCompanySoftware-1_0.deb, MyCompanyKernel-1_0.deb, MyCompanyOtherStuff-1_0.deb

  - Generous use of depends, requires, conflicts, provides, etc. (or maybe up-rev eg: kernel-image-2.6.8-1.deb to kernel-image-2.6.8-1-MyCompany-1.deb, these are the things you can ask for advice on Debian / Ubuntu lists).

  - Source control all files used in any of those *.deb packages, and make an automated build process that can take your source-control tree and generate your packages at any time of the day or night.

  - Set up internal repositories, ie: http://apt.mycompany.com/stable/ .../testing/ .../nightly/, etc. and integrate that with your testing / deployment infrastucture. ...but most of all, please READ the documentation that Debian has put together. In few words, it allows mostly volunteers in their spare time to do exactly what you are trying to do and with a high degree of reliability. The documentation in Debian Policy is the first stop (and most likely the last) for almost anything you are trying to do. When you see the types of bug-reports that are filed against packages that go against policy (ie: incorrect depends, provides, etc) you will see what types of mistakes are possible, and you should seriously consider how to check the work that you've done to make it more likely that your work would not have the same types of bugs filed against it.

--Robert

"Why doesn't Linux need defrags? As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to defrag a Linux drive."

As a matter of fact, there does exist a defrag utility for Ext2 filesystem,. I asked to Theodore Y. Ts'o about it once: e2defrag utility hasn't been kept up to date with the latest filesystem changes, only works on 1k blocks, and if it gets interrupted in the middle of the process, leaves your filesystem in a totally scrambled state. So it's not really something I can recommend you using....
Moreover, from Ts'o answers to my question I deduced that there is no Ext3 defragmenter; and no kernel defragger that works in idle time (contrary to what another post said)

CPython is faster (When you run IronPython on Mono):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/benchmar k.php?test=all&lang=python&lang2=iron

...at least in the first couple of screenshots in the "feature enhancements" section.

That's probably because of regressions or other bugs in the Freetype library. See, for instance, Debian bug #367593.

I've reverted back to 2.1.10-1 on my system for now, in order to avoid those issues. I can only hope that the API doesn't change before they fix the rendering issues...

Second of all, the Debian Free Software Guidelines simply do not permit use of the CDDL. More on this at http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/.

The page you link to has no mention of the CDDL. It does say: "Please note however, that the Debian project decides on particular packages rather than licenses in abstract, and the lists are general explanations."

and, curiosly enough, dvdrtools is in Debian but considered "non-free" (I think because of libscg).

and, curiosly enough, dvdrtools is in Debian but considered "non-free" (I think because of libscg).

BTW, does K3B use cdrecord too?

Yup.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/k3b

I was on the fence as to whether to hold the parent's opinion (which is that some projects have NIH issues that come out like this), or the general opinion that Joerg Schilling is seriously messed up. So I did some research. Read through these threads and I believe you will come to a point of view that is balanced and based on primary sources of evidence. You can also read my commentary, however it would be considered a secondary source of evidence.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00 113.html
There is a LOT of material here, I'll break down my impressions:
- Some instances of misunderstood word usage (ie CDDL is no longer acceptable to the Debian project in what appears to be a new bylaw or whatever they use)
    - as a result Joerg Schilling accuses the project of being 'untrustworthy' and 'suspect.' IMO Far too strong terms to use for what could at worst be described as inconsistency. And I'm stretching that definition.
- REFUSED a request to move legal discussion to more appropriate mailing lists and claimed that personal accusations/attacks were made upon him on debian-devel and pointed out his own feelings that he should defend himself on debian-devel (This seems like such a breach of decorum after a civil if difficult debate/raging argument)
- Interpreting the GPL Preamble as word of law (after failing several other dubious GPL interpretations and basically accusing the FSF GPL FAQ maintainers of not knowing how to do their job)
- Having finally been pegged to a request for a name change in the event of a fork, tries to lay claim to the name 'dvdrecord' despite having dubious ability to claim ownership of a generic trademark like 'cdrecord' in the first place.

On the whole debian-devel participants displayed an AMAZING sense of decorum and civility in the face of nonsensical diatribes and difficult debate. Props to them.

There is a more technical debate dated around February on LKML regarding libsgc and cdrecord. (no link simply because I'm having trouble finding the head of the discussion, search LKML Jorg to find.) Here it appears that Joerg Schilling simply appears to be unwilling to compromise functionality and code in order to make his software work properly (or sanely) under Linux. This is closely tied into a unique view on how to make his code cross-platform and the fact that libsgc is meant to integrate with a far greater generalization of SCSI components than just CD drivers.

I don't understand the technical intricacies but it appears that over time the SCSI and IDE interface has changed dramatically. As a result he believes the kernel should change to accomodate his software. That wasn't received very well at which point it might have been appropriate to chalk it up to simple disagreement and walk away, however it degenerated into a variety of other semi-related discussions that were far too personal. (Keep an eye open for 'smake' and the 'Schily Makefile System,' I kid you not.)