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Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling
An anonymous reader writes "Debian's cdrecord maintainers announced that they have had enough of Jörg Schilling and kicked his program suite cdrtools out of Debian, introducing a free fork of his no longer free cdrtools." I've put the message below, along with some other links.
So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to better use elsewhere.
In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling. He even commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an upstream maintainer can do. Naturally, there were occasionally disagreements, but this is normal.
Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL and Jörg Schilling released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license. The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says that this is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have video from that talk available.
Here is the FSF position about the CDDL. This thread contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more context also see the other mails in that thread. In short -- the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not allow. Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL *may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of them. That is and always was our point.
For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge.
Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Here is our svn repository.
In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling. He even commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an upstream maintainer can do. Naturally, there were occasionally disagreements, but this is normal.
Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL and Jörg Schilling released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license. The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says that this is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have video from that talk available.
Here is the FSF position about the CDDL. This thread contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more context also see the other mails in that thread. In short -- the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not allow. Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL *may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of them. That is and always was our point.
For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge.
Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Here is our svn repository.
Looks like they kicked Hemos, too.
They told him to fork off.
I understand dropping his package, but kicking him? Man, I don't want to upset the Debian team.
Won't the GPLv3 be incompatible with the GPL?
Fellowship 9/11
They refer to MPL in the message and I wondered if that's that Mozilla license and if that is really incompatible with the FSF.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Because most of the thousands of OSS cd tools are merely front-ends to cdrecord.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I retract my comment from the other day (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195649&cid=16 033548). The folks at Debian are still apparantly squabbling over how free is free enough.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Do I read that message correctly as saying that MPL-like licenses are not allowed in Debian? If so, did Debian also not allow Mozilla back in the old days when it was MPL/NPL licensed, or is this a new decision?
Anyone who kept track of Joerg Schilling, and his prominent ego, was able to clearly see the inevitable fork from quite a distance away. Schilling was another one of those types -- like the dude who was running some obscure piece of code known as xfree86 -- whose success and prominence as the author of a popular free software package went completely into his head.
No, this should not be suprising news to anyone who's been following LKML. You could've predicted this a long time ago. What is really interesting here is the revelation that Sun explicitly made CDDL intentionally incompatible with GPL. That is, what I think, the newsworthy fact, and should be a wake up call to all the Sun fan club who've been slobbering all over themselves on the account of Sun's promises of releasing Java as free software.
Reading this just underscores the fact that you just can't trust Sun, and nobody should hold their breath on account of Java.
Yep, and in the OSS world developers are the lowest of the low. They are to be trampled upon and their non-programming inputs ignored. Who needs those developers? There are plenty more where that came from! The lawyers for the FSF rule all.
Here we have on the front page of Slashdot a developer who has contributed years of free work whose name is being dragged through the mud. This should be a wake up call.
I wonder if this has anything to do with him recently quiting? It seems that debian has been taking one hit after another lately.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
What Danese Cooper says is wrong. I and many other members of the OpenSolaris project know for certain that SUN did not create the CDDL to be purposefully incompatible with the GPL. SUN even releases other software under the GPL and LGPL.
It is also important to note that Danese Cooper's employment with SUN ended in March of 2005 (http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper/). This means that any statements made by her are not officially representative of SUN. Conspiracy theorists are free to believe what they wish.
In addition, what the maintainers have failed to mention is that they have repatedly introduced patches to the codebase that have broken or otherwise caused problems in the cdrtools codebase. They need help because they don't know how to maintain cdrtools properly.
In addition, there are currently problems with Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Notably that the project does not consistently enforce them because many rules are not explicitly written, instead each software is judged on a case-by-case interpretation making it difficult for upstream developers to comply and those interpretations themselves are not always consistent. If you want proof of this, just read the various flame wars on debian-legal, etc.
I thought that someone already forked this long ago because of problems with Joerg Schilling mucking around with the license? Read the wikipedia entry on dvdrtools. In fact, dvdrtools is already a debian package. Why did they need another fork?
I suspect that, as usual, the license issues are really just an excuse, and that the real reason is that the current maintainer of cdrtools hasn't been doing a very good job. What's up with IDE being deprecated? Why do they make us go through all that SCSI business, when at least 95% of the people who use it have no SCSI? Hopefully the debian fork will make the cdrtools better and more usable.
How did they drag him through the mud? They say his new license isn't compatible, they offer evidence
to support their view, but they admit he's helped them a lot in the past.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Not according to the FSF themselves, who list it under the heading 'The following licenses are free software licenses, but are not compatible with the GNU GPL'.
So obvious that you did it yourself, eh?
ResidntGeek
XV was booted because it could only be dustributed as source. And of course the fact the author still demands shareware fees for an app that hasn't been updated in seven years.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I couldn't find that in the article, is this your personal inside information, did you talk to him or are you just asuming it, as it is so easy to interpret decisions in a way that fulfills your own prejudices.
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
Some of us grew tired of his rantings about: ...
- why scsi emulation was better than native atapi/ide support
- why the dvd patches were unofficial, and dangerous and you should buy his dvd modifications instead.
- his insistance of clearly marking "unofficial" versions with warnings that tell you to use or buy his version
- his sections of code that were not to be modified because he was afraid of answering questions about others instable patches.
- his license change
-
cdrtools is dead. long live cdrkit.
Thats a good thing to do.
And the other comments - read what they wrote. They have said they never judged the freeness of the CDDL, only its incompatibility with GPL. And thats simply true.
It made sense when CDs cost over a buck, and burns took an hour. Now the damned delay before you burn is a signifigant percentage of the total burn time. There should at least be a flag to skip it.
The Debian side itself says in the message that Mr. Schilling's is the original upstream code, and that he has been very supportive of them in the past.
It almost sounds as if they wanted to dictate to him what the terms should be, and they are unhappy that he is not complying.
Schilling became a traitor when he wrote his first piece of unFree software {a version of cdrecord which could handle DVDs}. Of course, an unofficial, DVD-ready fork was soon created ..... and remained Free.
My absolute respect to the Debian guys for doing this.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Debian includes plenty of GPL-incompatible software. (Apache, anyone?) Incompatibility is not in and of itself an issue.
The issue is that part of cdrecord is GPL and part of it is CDDL. The GPL requires the entire package to be GPL-compatible; thus the license is self-contradictory, and Debian refuses to distribute it under these conditions. THAT is why they are forking.
So, does this mean Jörg's cdrtools will go the way of XFree86 4.4+?
I can see a lot of positive things coming out of this move.
Slagborr
It's true that Jörg Schilling contributed to OSS for many years and we should all thank him for that.
However, I was pretty disappointed the day I got to his site and saw that I had to pay for cdrecord if I wished to burn... a DVD ?! For crying out loud...
This kind of event is actually hindering for the OSS community in general. During years no one needed to create a set of cd-recording tools for Linux, because... there were already Jörg Schilling's ones ! Until one day, he decides to put a lid on further enhancement of his old "free" package and creates a semi-commercial product.
Now someone will have to start almost from "scratch zero" to create/evolve the new "free" cd/dvd burning tool for GNU-based operating systems.
I mean really. I've always thought that Debian was a tad on the snobby side with the whole GPL thing, to the point of being rather unworkable. You can have software freedom, as long as it's a certain kind of freedom. All other forms of freedom are hereby determined not free by the arbiters of free! (doesn't that seem rather silly? Thought so.)
Good for Jorg to stick to his guns. He can choose whatever license he wants to release his code under.
I think they forgot to mention all the other bullshit as well. The upstream cdrecord had many problems which lived on for a time in Debian's patched version, including;
- Not being able to burn via device node. You have to specify some cryptic sequence of numbers.
- Not being able to burn as a non-root user. WTF?
- Lot's of FUD in the program output about how you should use Solaris instead of Linux.
Any bug reports relating to this on Debian's bugtracker usually incited Joerg to long fits of counterproductive trolling. Hopefully they'll see sense and ban him from similarly messing up the cdrkit bugtracker.
cdrecord dev=1,0,0 -eject schilling.iso
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Hear hear.
Question : how can a licence with extra restrictions provide more freedom than the GPL ?
The way cdrecord accesses CD-RW drives in GNU/Linux is different from all other applications. Another one of those "I'll do it my way" ideas by Jörg Schilling.
and worse off, a GPL software cannot be dependent on non-GPL software. The GPL requires that all components of the program are to be Free - you can't legally build a GPL'd frontend to a proprietary or otherwise non-GPL-compatibile backend.
Therefore all these thousands of the cd tools depending on cdrecord would either have to change the license (and abandonning GPL is not easy and in many cases just impossible) or be stuck with the old (last GPL'd) version of cdrecord.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The article says there is a video where "Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- incompatible", but the URL given (http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-mee tings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-5-14/tower/O penSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lo pez_Ortega.ogg gives me a 404.
Anyone got a working URL? Thanks.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
You go XFree86 on the FOSS community, the FOSS community goes X.Org on you.
Guess who wins... 6 months later you don't even hear about the former one anymore.
Why didn't the author include Joerg's position on this? He didn't even provide a link to his hompage:t ml
/.) could comment on that one, since I am not a kernel hacker.
/. as well as his problems with other distros and the kernel suggest that he is. I simply don't know. But I also heard that Linux Torvalds can be a very harsh himself. Anybody want to fork the kernel because of that?
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.h
He also seems to have problems with Suse and RedHat as far as his homepage goes (they also include older versions) and with the Linux kernel itself. There seems to be some stuff he dislikes about the SCSI subsystem. And he seems to prefer the way Solaris handles SCSI. Maybe someone with some insight (if there are any left on
Joerg Schilling is doing excellent work. But as some others have commented there seem to be personal issues. So it is a shame that they had to use such a lame excuse to boot him. I am pretty sure the fork will go nowhere or at best use patches from Joerg Schilling proving that there never were incompatible licences.
Note that I don't argue that he might be a difficult character. Comments on
As FreeBSD user, I don't care much about Debian's specific decisions; but regarding cdrtools, I fully agree. The latest versions have become annoyingly FUD-dy and kind of ads for Joerg's commercial version. Fortunately, burncd (for CD) and growisofs (for DVD) work just as fine here. cdrkit will be a welcome addition to FreeBSD's ports system as well.
It's not the first time some developer's stubborn-ness resulted in a fork. That's the beauty of OSS (GPL and other OSS-compatible licenses): control freaks can't get away with it. Now let's hope some brave soul would adopt cdrkit and keep it up to date with the newest burning technology.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Debian can choose whatever licenses are acceptable to release code under. Jorg can go screw himself.
For numerous unrelated reasons, a fork has been sorely needed. The license mess just makes it easier to get everyone to go for it. Thanks Jorg!
Aside from the fact that he still makes his work available under an approved Open Source license: Programmers gotta eat too. Not everybody gets picked up by a company to do paid work on Open Source projects. There's still no satisfactory solution to keep at least all long-time programmers of central projects on some kind of payroll. People should respect when someone who gave them so much for free feels the need to stop doing that. Again, in this case that isn't even what's happening.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, it is surely possible for Debian to issue a statement about it without resorting to personal abuse? Debian has so many, many good things going for it, and yet the whole project seems to let itself down so often by displaying attitude problems of one kind or another. FFS: "You're a liar, No I'm not, Yes you are", etc., etc., should have been left behind in the school playground.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
MOD PARENT UP
I was wondering this too!
Sure the VM will be free software, it just won't be GPL compatable. So you'll never be able to use GPL code in the VM and you'll never be able to use VM code in anything licensed with the GPL.
There are free licenses that are not compatible with the GPL.
Back in the 1980s, the SCSI command protocol and the old-style SCSI bus were a matched pair. Devices had ID numbers that you could set with jumpers. Devices didn't move around. There was no hot-plug or plug-and-play.
/dev are now set by the user. UDEV matches various things (serial number, manufacturer, location, etc.) to identify the device. Device numbers are dynamic and essentially random. The names are stable. Normal apps open devices by name.
/dev/sg* devices, which are intended for screwball devices that don't have normal drivers. It is similar to a modem program bypassing the /dev/tty* devices by calling iopl() and then directly controlling the hardware.
Now we run the SCSI protocol over USB, FireWire, SerialATA, TCP/IP, and numerous other transports. You can't address all the devices on the Internet with a 3-bit number. Devices come and go. If you plug in a CD burner, it usually shouldn't matter which USB port you use.
The Linux solution is UDEV. We can also use D-BUS and HAL. Device names in
Joerg wants to use an obsolete backdoor. He doesn't use the normal device names or the normal CD/DVD driver. He uses the
Suppose you have two USB burners. If you yank out your USB cable and then put it back, the device numbers may change. The device names can remain the same, thanks to UDEV. Joerg's defective program will be unaware of this. It will just use the wrong burner.
Yes! Here's my obvious solution (kernel 2.6) :
dd if=dvd.iso of=/dev/dvd
Go to his own site. See him selling the full version. The version with source code is crippled. He left out the DVD code.
In other words, it's a crippleware trial version.
The copyright for the old GPL-licensed version which they've turned into "cdrkit" is still with Schilling (unless he specifically assigned it to the FSF, which is unlikely), so if he wants to, Schilling can tell Debian to "fork off" too, ie. deny them the right to distribute it as part of the distro. I doubt that he will though.
It's the copyright holder's right to allow or deny any specific distribution of his code. The GPL licensing merely says that if it is distributed, then its source code must accompany it, or be made available subsequently. It doesn't override the copyright holder's wishes in any other respect.
While Debian has the balls to do this, Gentoo already had a GPLed fork of cdrtools available, and TOOK IT AWAY just because a new version of cdrtools came out with a few new features.
There is a ongoing development of cdrtools replacement.
http://libburn.pykix.org/
Everyone is welcome to join.
Have you ever read an email by Mr Schilling? Try this thread on lkml, and tell me who is being the most annoying. He drags himself through the mud by alienating people with his attitude.
IANAL nor a Debian Developer, but as a Debian user I seem to remember that Debian has a non-free "tree" of packages, since "main" has to be DFSG-compatible. In fact, no package can be in main if its dependencies are non-DFSG. The DFSG's restrictions reads in many ways like cliff notes of someone reading the GPL(the GPL seems longer and more legalese), and explicitly approve the artistic, BSD and GPL licenses. I'm thinking the CDDL isn't just GPL-incompatible, but is also violates the DFSG, but again IANAL(although I read the thread linked from the article and they seem to agree with me). Back on your question about how licensing would make things incompatible, it only matters when, like Debian, you distribute the whole thing, with a charter and/or some agreement that all the licenses meet a specific set of criteria. It wouldn't stop say, Novell or Mandriva, which, I believe, operate under no licensing restrictions other than the licenses themselves.
Just because it's not something explicit in the article nor explicit/implicit in some text at the software's main page does not mean it's an easy assumption or a prejudice from my part.
The reply is my interpretation based on what I observed from the cdrecord site over the years. I would show you a log with the relevant web page changes, if I could.
Anyway, if you google for "cdrecord-ProDVD" + "Schilling" you'll find inumerous flame wars contemporary to Jörg's "transition".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_License
Copyright (c)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Looks very similar to BSD license to me....
Next news- OMG!!11ELEVEN... XORG IS BANNED FROM DEBIAN- introducing framebuffer desktop now....
I pity that fool whose name messes my firefox live bookmark.
The language used in both GPLv2 and GPLv3 to define the limits of "aggregation" as a mechanism of exemption is incredibly vague (in reality, there is no significant attempt to define it at all), but the FSF have made their "wishes" well known on the matter, even if the licenses don't really affirm it.
And their "wishes" are that huge numbers of the files which you'd think are merely aggregated on the distro media are tied together by links of various kinds, and that those links taint the copyright across from file to file, despite the lack of any legal basis for it (the law is pretty clear on what constitutes a derivative work which is subject to copyright law, and this isn't it.).
So, we're actually in a very grey area. It certainly isn't as simple and clearcut as you write, that a distro is a mere aggregation. I wish it was. The current quagmire is a benefit only to lawyers.
Now try that with CDs and say it again.
Is this part of the kernel? Does every package that is part of Debian have to be GPL-compatible?I ncompatibleLicenses)
Apache's license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Apache is a Debian package. The Latex license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Latex is available for Debian without a fork.
(see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPL
So what is the problem here?
How is this still modded informative? This is not even close to the truth... There's no need for the whole distro to be under one license.
Reminds me of the time that he broke the scsi module of cdrecord to not build in linux 2.6, because he didnt like how linux did something or another... and Alan Cox dressed him down by writing a 3 line patch.
Out of general interest, I read this thread. It starts out with a guy complaining that Joerg didn't respond to email. When Joerg appears, he states that he did respond to the email, the next day. Then all hell breaks loose and everybody is immediately on Joerg's case. There's obviously a lot of historical resentment here, but this particular discussion doesn't really paint Joerg in a bad light.
Where the hell are my mod points?
I just read that entire thread, and it made me really sad to see that level of patient immobility in the mind of one whose tools are/were so well-used.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
ABOUT!!!
EFFFING!!!
TIME!!!
I have DESPISED this man's code since the day I saw it. His BONEHEADED insistence on doing things the Solaris way in Linux, his apparent INABILITY to use a standard build system, and the INSUFFERABLE ARROGANCE he displays through absolutely everything he does are completely INFURIATING.
Think I'm spewing flamebait? Nonsense. Read this bug report about cdrtools. He starts by insisting his misinterpretation of the GPL is correct, goes on to threaten defamation(slander) lawsuits in german courts against Debian, and finishes up calling most the people in the discussion thread "convinced liars". The man is unusable as an open source contributor, and I am ecstatic that more people actually realize this now.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Cool, I look forward to OpenBSD forking cdrtools into something truely free and better.
Thanks for that. The link didn't work, but I was able to guess the right link from it.
I also found the Debian video archive, which I didn't know existed. I'll try to get it added to FSFE's free software advocacy video list so that these things are in one place.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- incompatible.
...to stop those bastards at IBM getting their filthy puritanical hands on the code!!!
You make that sound like a bad thing.
(IMO, it's the GPL which is incompatible with other, more sensible licenses.)
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
The thing to remember is that the developer chooses the licence and we either should comply or use something else. Personally I would prefer if the FSF would go after non free software issues instead of trying to beat up people on the same side as easy targets - remember Trolltech also had a nice open licence but they were picked on until they went GPL.
Has anyone here ever tried to buy a ProDVD license? I have, on behalf of a former employer, and the result (by email) was always no reply. Every year or so our production system would stop working until someone realized that another "free" key had gone bad.
So not only does Jörg keep his software non-free - he doesn't take money for it either. I concluded a long time ago that his thought processes are not standard issue.
I guess this is just making the "unofficial" DVD-capable free CDRecord a bit more official. And I'd be surprised if Debian didn't patch xcdroast not to complain about cdrecord versions.
Schilling has sold out, pure and simple. CDRecord is a classic bait-and-switch scam. To release unFree software is an expression of nothing but contempt for users' freedoms. Fortunately, the GPL is doing its job, and someone else has done what Schilling was unprepared to do -- released a DVD-capable version of cdrecord which respects users' freedoms. That's a pretty loud raspberry.
ProDVD should be left dead in the water by this; it will obviously find its way into the next Ubuntu, and I can see the likes of Fedora, Mandriva and OpenSUSE adopting it in a heartbeat. I hope that happens. It will make a great cautionary tale.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Just to point out something: Jörg has put his makefiles under the CDDL, not parts of the source itself. The problem is, that according to section 3 of the GPL you must provide the _complete_ source code under the GPL. Now, the GPL states explicitely that "complete source code" includes "all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"
Well, most people would regard the makefiles as scripts, not so Jörg. And therefore he doesn't see a conflict between licenses. The Debian people see it differently and therefore see distributing binaries of this as a violation of section 3 of the GPL.
What I don't understand: Why do they fork the complete work? Why don't they just write new makefiles under GPL, put it together with the rest of the code and are 100% GPL afterwards? I would assume that this is much easier than keeping up a complete fork.
I think, that this all went out of proportion - where both sides are to blame for this.
According to http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html :
"I would like to release a program I wrote under the GNU GPL, but I would like to use the same code in non-free programs.
"To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this. If you are the copyright holder for the code, you can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times."
Jörg Schilling is perfectly within his rights to take a program that he wrote and holds the copyright to, and release it under the SDDL and not the GPL. Assuming, of course, that he has approval for the relicensing from every copyright holder and has rewritten the code where the approval wasn't granted...
However, it is a shitty move...but, what can ya do besides fork?
FreeBSD is the only major OS still in the dark about this. Systems that can address devices by name include Linux, Windows, MacOS X, AIX, IRIX, OpenBSD, and even Solaris. (Joerg lies about this: if you check the code, you can see that he works hard to emulate the old numbering on modern OSes) FreeBSD is in the company of AmigaOS, MS-DOS, Ultrix, etc.
/dev/sony-dvd and /dev/lightscribe. Unplug the drives, and the Linux /dev files go away. (udevd deletes them) Plug them in again in different locations, and watch the /dev files come back: same name, same permissions, even if the device numbers change. On FreeBSD you can do the -scanbus thing, unplug and replug the burners, then burn the wrong CD because the ID numbers changed.
/dev files appear automatically. Why does FreeBSD need this? Don't you support hot-plug?
For people with more than one burner, device names are far superior. When I plug in a couple USB drives, they can get useful names. FreeBSD uses 1,2,3 and 1,2,4 while Linux uses whatever the user likes:
It's been a damn long time since I've needed to rescan a SCSI bus. (last time: a now-fixed driver bug) When I plug in a device, the
There is nothing wrong with forking from an older version. Starting from scratch is usually stupid.
Sure. He can do that. He has the right.
That's a very irritating decision though, especially when he refuses patches to add the missing feature.
It's Debian's right to decide Joerg can go to Hell.
Joerg avoids documenting the existance of support for device files. He threatens to remove it. Some of the support is not in Joerg's code anyway, but in patches that are applied by others. I'm not sure if dev=/dev/rcd0c works without OpenBSD patches, but in any case it is "not supported" by Joerg.
/dev, but some sort of Mach-based IOKit namespace. I forget the status of NetBSD. Probably DragonflyBSD is as broken as FreeBSD.
/dev names. Most of the "real" UNIX systems use /dev names that just happen to resemble the old notation, which is OK. Windows uses drive letters which map to objects in the, uh, non-Win32 NT-native object space.
/dev that could be mapped to -- the opposite of the mapping he performs on every modern OS.
/dev/c0b0t0l0 or /dev/c0b0t0 is what people expect. People don't want 0,0,0. The situation is somewhat tolerable there, because the translation can be done in your head. You can't tell that "/dev/Christmas present" on a Linux box is 0,1,0 unless you use -scanbus.
OpenBSD does a decent job of things. FreeBSD does not. Darwin is OK, though a bit odd: the real device names are neither SCSI nor
Of course Linux uses
No matter the OS, people want to use the regular names. Joerg does that for MS-DOS, AmigaOS, various less popular things, and I suppose FreeBSD. I "suppose" because FreeBSD does have partially working names in
Even on Solaris,
The headline should read: "Debian forks cdrtools"
Of course, that wouldn't be news, because Debian forks things all the time.
http://outcampaign.org/
I mean, I of course see the point of removing Jörg Schilling from the equation, but the guys from ark linux have already made a clean fork a few months ago called dvdrtools ( http://www.arklinux.org/projects/dvdrtools ) ( server seems to be down at the moment ).
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Yes, just like you can't use GPL software on Windows or Mac OS X....
As far as im concerned, licenses are irrelevant anyway and i can do what ever i please.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You should read the whole thread.
Any criticism on how eg USB doesn't follow Joergs preferred namingscheme goes unanswered somehow.
I'm only a simple user, but even in my experience the dev=h,b,t,l way to address a burner is flawed. Anyone can reproduce it with 1 usb burner and a couple of usb drives or simply 1 firewire disk (which will simply increase the hostid each time you unplug/plug it (atleast mine does)).
He had some credits for bringing cd recording to Linux, but maybe he should simply abandon Linux and concentrate on his beloved Solaris.
On this post, there are many people who say that cdrtools doesn't use proper hardware abstractions, and its use of SCSI is outdated. While it is definitely true that SCSI unit ID's are user unfriendly and don't reflect modern hardware, the use of SCSI itself is justified.
The MMC standard (multimedia command set) for optical media is based on SCSI. The MMC takes a subset of SCSI's command set and extends it. All modern readers and burners use MMC.
The MMC is meant to be hardware-neutral. The command set is independent of the type of bus with which the device is attached. Each type of bus has a method over which such SCSI commands are sent. SCSI uses itself, IDE uses ATAPI, and I have no idea what USB drives use. ATAPI in particular is an escape sequence to encapsulate these SCSI commands inside ATA commands.
Once this is set up, the user-mode burning programs use some mechanism to send SCSI commands to the drive. These SCSI commands get encapsulated as necessary by the kernel drivers. A burning program only needs to know the SCSI commands and does not need to worry about the particular bus.
In Windows, you do this by opening the devnode for the drive (\Device\CdRom0). You then send IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH ioctls to execute the commands. For IDE devices, the IDE driver will convert these into ATA commands using ATAPI.
I heard that ide-scsi in the Linux kernel is not enabled by default anymore, which seems like a bad idea.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Actually they weren't so much "picked on", as they were "competed with". GNOME was started just for this sole purpose. It worked.
Ah, but you see, that is not the fault of cdrtools! Oh no! Rather, it is a flaw in the (unmaintained) Linux kernel, that should have simply adopted the design of Solaris' SCSI subsystem that has been in use since the year 1981!
If you continue to experience problems then it is recommended that you upgrade to Solaris or Linux 2.4.
I'd love to switch to Solaris, but the mainboard manifacturer dind't include a Solaris driver and the sata controller is not on the HWCL (neither are the video and wireless). But I must admid I think this hardware will not work with Linux 2.4 either (2.6.15 or later required).
:)
Poor poor me being stuck with 2.6 and hotplug to create simple and easy symlinks
While I subscribe to most parts of your post (why, yes, GP is a total loser and presumably a troll as well), I can't leave above quote without comment. Please do never, ever reduce history to single persons' deeds or believes, and especially not in this case. Unfortunately, it wasn't mostly Hitler who wanted to exterminate the European Jews, all of them, eventually it was the Nazis and most of the German people who very much thought alike - and acted alike.
It's what you get when anti-semitism and death cult go mainstream in a people that has the power to realize the resulting goals. This was the case in Nazi Germany, and it is again the case in Lebanon and Iran (minus, as of yet, aforementioned power, but slowly getting there). Today as well, it is not a Nasrallah or Ahmahdinedjahd (sp?) problem, it is a volksgemeinschaft problem like in the 1930s/40s. Break the arabian volksgemeinschaft that's only just developing (not sure if the Israeli air raids were any success in that respect), and Israel has a chance to survive. Of course this would mean civil war throughout Lebanon, Syria and Iran, to say the least.
Prepare for some rather harsh years to come.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
I think this is pretty much the file you forgot:
/ 4/en/os/i386/SRPMS/sg3_utils-1.06-3.src.rpm
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise
That is an SRPM. Red Hat doesn't seem to provide binary RPM files
for ES4. You should have an rpmbuild command that will build that
into a regular rpm. The rpm command itself used to be able to build
from source; probably the ability still exists in RHEL ES4.
Debian certainly provides sg_scan.
As for ifconfig: that is kind of obsolete now. It's a compatibility
hack that uses a sort of BSD emulation layer. Getting to know the
more-powerful native tools (the ip command) would be a good idea.
He'd be in the clear if cdrecord were 100% his own work. If that were the case, then one might reasonably argue that he has implicitly granted an exception to the GPL and/or CDDL.
Problem for Joerg: he has included GPL work from other people. This puts Joerg in violation of the GPL.
I haven't replied specifically to one comment in this thread because what I have to say applies to so many posts in so many threads, so without singling anyone out... Of couse I've seen all this before, but it is still shocking to see all the posts which display such utter ignorance of FOSS licenses and issues. It makes me suspect there are many here who do not even understand they are participating in a forum which is owned by Open Source Technology Group, and more still who don't even understand the purpose of the GPL and the FSF. I say this not to insult anyone, but to point out how far out of context some people are here, either due to intellectual laziness or intrinsic philosophical differences. Whichever, it certainly makes for a lot of wasted effort and it's frustrating seeing idiotic comments modded +[some number >1] insightful or informative again and again. Maybe I'm just particularly grumpy today, but dammit I really wish people would ask themselves "why am I posting?" before hitting reply more often. Go ahead and mod me troll, it doesn't matter. Someone needs to read this. We are a nation of widespread ignorance and nothing gets done ignoring that.
Caveat Utilitor
He reminded me a lot of the Xfree86 crew. holding back true innovation.
His cdrtools is pretty much garbage. alot of good foundwork and ideas, but he always wanted to control the what.
In all honesty he lacked the complete talent aspect of Keith Richard, and totally unlike the control and organization of Linus, or the FreeBSD engineering team.
Finally the little bitchfest of "who was right" of how to do something is over.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
If the world revolved around cdrecord, Joerg might be right to chose naming that is the same across all platforms.
/dev/* names on Linux, drive letters and NT-native object names on Windows, Mach IOKit names on MacOS X, and so on. The 1980s-style numbers are good for 1980s-style OSes like MS-DOS.
The consistency we want is consistency with all other apps on the platform. That means the
Ideally the command switches would start with "/" on MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2.
Porting an app means adapting to the environment.
personally I think Debian should be looking at it that way instead of saying that if it isn't GPL it is the wrong licence.
That's not the issue. Debian is not making a stance regarding GPL. The issue here is that Debian cannot legally distribute code that within itself mixes two incompatible licenses. This was the case with newer versions of cdrtools. It directly mixed together code under both GPL and CDDL licenses. (as opposed to using libraries or other means of clean separation) GPL and CDDL licenses say you can't mix their code, but the author of cdrtools did it anyhow -- even after being alerted by Debian's legal team.
Other distributions will be forced to fork the cdrtools code as well, unless they want to risk being sued. This issue has nothing to do with Debian being "political" or "favoring GPL" or any other such nonsense.
"his thought processes are not standard issue"
Oh my. That is perfect.
This is probably going to get modded down as flamebait, but I'll say it anyway... I've been following some of the threads involving Joerg Schilling and while he definitely has some user interface bugs, some of the other people involved aren't any better. The whole thing comes across as kiddies squabbling over who took whose toy at lunchtime in the playground, with inanities like sniping over missing 'References' headers in mail messages. I can certainly see his point of view (having to include special-case checks for distros that do broken things with his tools, leading to lots of extra support work for him), although there are probably better ways to handle it than the ones he employed. The "problems" though seem more like religious sects arguing over minor differences in dogma than any solid reason for dropping the tools - it leaves a rather poor impression of the whole community.
/me runs away, screeeeaming for his LIFE!
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
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.
0 113.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg0
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.)
I applaud this. Of all the software maintainers I have ever been in contact with,
Schilling has been the most arrogant one by at least one order of magnitude, and
even if cdrecord once was a fine and necessary tool, there are far more usable tools
right now (that don't require license keys in the environment or similar crud).
For me beef of the story was Sun's revelation that CDDL is intentionally incompatible with GPL. MPL were needed to be that way to be able to protect Netscape/Mozilla/etc trademarks and names. But CDDL?? What Sun has to lose???
There is nothing wrong to be incompatible. But on Sun's part it really looks like holy war on GPL. But that's understandable - from their proprietary software vendor perspective.
But the Schilling person really makes fool out of himself all the time. All the discussions I have read that guy had no single technical argument. It all were coming down to "you do not understand" and "people I trust told me." You hardly can argue with such guy. But as long as cdrtools were working as expected that was tolerated. But now he really did it: he screwed licensing. (In a way he remind me ex-Linux-IDE maintainer Andre Hedrick - he also had problems with argumentation.)
P.S. I guess for Sun GPL is real eyesore, since first thing most of the users do with Solaris of theirs is installing GNU tools. And CDE was replaced recently with GNOME. Not that it helped Solaris somehow.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Open Source community does not need such a dickhead! Let that fucker go lick Sun's ass! Bye, bye we don't miss you!
With choice (hurrah!), comes choice (gah). Is there a comparison of linux CD burning tools anywhere? I see cdrecord, cdrkit, cdrdao, dvdrtools, dvdrecord, growisofs (which seems to have it's own integrated burning code, as opposed to mkisofs which needs cdrecord), and someone mentioned that with kernel 2.6 you can screw them all and just dd directly to /dvd/dvd. I've also been looking for UDF(?) so I can mount the DVD/RW just like any other media, and read / write to a regular filesystem, but from what I hear that doesn't work properly yet...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
From wikipedia:
:->
Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is an open source and Free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL), version 1.1. The CDDL was submitted for approval to the Open Source Initiative on December 1, 2004 and approved as an open source license in mid January 2005
What's wrong with this?
Meh.. I don't really care. Nero Burning ROM handles all the burning I need to do
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I remember back in 1998 when I first had to mess with the cd writer code to add support for refrigerator-sized CD/DVD archive devices. My change was very small, just a device description really. I thought it was kind of weird that it required some other tool instead of the usual gmake but in the install guide Jorg pretty much said that he liked it that way, so there! It was annoying.
Even then, I thought it wouldn't take much to convert it over to a more standard build tool like GNU make. Why Jorg has to be such a stick-in-the-mud for a proprietary build tool is a puzzle to me... unless maybe he wrote it.
My understanding is that cdrtools is GPL and the schillymakefilesystem used to build cdrtools is CDDL and it is this combination that's unacceptable to the GPL.
So why not split the packages; have a cdrtools package under GPL and a schillymakefilesystem package under CDDL. Now the cdrtools package needs a build system, so a debian developer writes a GPL compatible one and this calls the schillymakefilesystem at run-time.
Make the schillymakefilesystem package a dependency of the cdrtools package and Bob's yer uncle.
Or am I being naive?
Firefox is available under GPL. :
That is not true.
See http://www.mozilla.com/about/licensing.html
Mozilla Licensing Policies
Mozilla's software is open source. This means that the software is not only available for download free of charge, but you have access to the source code and may modify and redistribute our software subject to certain restrictions as detailed in the Mozilla Public License. Official binary releases from the Mozilla Foundation are also released under the Mozilla End-User License Agreement.
Our code is free, but we do strictly enforce our trademark rights, we must, in order to keep them valid. Our trademarks include, among others, the names Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Bugzilla and XUL, as well as the Mozilla logo, Firefox logo, Thunderbird logo and the red lizard logo. This means that, while you have considerable freedom to redistribute and modify our software, there are tight restrictions on your ability to use the Mozilla name and logos, even when built into binaries that we provide.
> For me beef of the story was Sun's revelation that CDDL is intentionally incompatible with GPL
Being too lazy to read the thread, could you point me to the part where someone @sun.com actually posts "yes, we deliberately made it incompatible"?
It's not like there's any license in the world that's compatible with the GPL anyway.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
cdrtools is nothing without Joerg. Attempts have been made before to fork off of the source code, and they turned out to be crap. The only thing you will be able to produce without Joerg is crappy copies of his work; you simply don't have what it takes, as the past track record has already shown.
I for one will always be willing to help and support Joerg in his efforts because the man knows what he's talking about (and what he is doing). Forking because of the GPL ideology is simply a stupidity.
Isn't it kind of disingenious to assume that the incompatibility is a mistake? The GPL has been around for over a decade, it's well understood in the open source community. The CDDL has been around for a couple years. Sun had every opportunity to ensure that the CDDL and GPL were compatible, if they had wanted them to be. Obviously, since the result is that they are incompatible, they didn't want them to be. What logic could you use to come to a different result?
> Sun had every opportunity to ensure that the CDDL and GPL were compatible
The only licenses compatible with the GPL are BSD/MIT/X11, which allow a one-way sublicensing conversion to the GPL. By not using the GPL, they wrote an incompatible license.
I don't see how this is Sun's problem or even a matter of intent. If people want to scream and yell at Sun for not adopting the GPL, that's their prerogative. It's also Sun's to not listen.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
"It's also Sun's to not listen."
Exactly, they choose this course. Their intent can be inferred from their action. Had their intent been to be compatible, they would have been compatible.
And you should note, I never said it's a problem for Sun or anyone else. I just think it's silly for people to go around thinking that Sun didn't write their license to say what it says on purpose. They might not have gone out of their way to be GPL incompatible, but they obviously did not intend for the CDDL to be compatible.
...SUN has released more code than any other company under *free* and *open source* software licenses...
You spelled Red Hat "SUN". That's an odd spelling of Red Hat.
> They might not have gone out of their way to be GPL incompatible
The implied allegation in the thread and elsewhere here however, is that they did go out of their way.
Not that the random rantings of Slashdotters really has much currency, though it appears DD's are going the same way.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I've you've been reading heise.de, you are probably missing Joerg here.
He's one of the biggest trolls on heise.de, sending "corrected" versions of each article relevant to him... so why doesn't he do the same on slashdot?
Are moderators too harsh on his trolling? Is he blacklisted?
Dudes, I definitely miss his trollposts here. They can be very entertaining.
The most interesting effect on troll-ridden heise forums however are his troll fanboys. There are a couple of users^Wtrolls there that are actually quite good at repeating his non-arguments. So good that some people suspect them to actually be additional logins of Joerg Schilling.
Debian GNU/Linux - apt-get into it.
Neither Debian nor anyone else can do that.
So the problem is not simply that the new cdrtools was something incompatible with Debian, it is that it was (in Debian's opinion) something that was illegal to distribute period.
Ah yes, I see. I don't know the details to the POSIX spec, so I didn't realize disabling seek was not compliant. I figured they had just made it so you could stream the entire iso image onto the disk, which would make things quite easy. Perhaps a character device could be made to do that?
One thought I had a few weeks ago was to create a filesystem driver which would allow updating of rewritable CDs. The system would cache the updates in RAM and burn all the new files when the disk was unmounted or the computer was nearly out of memory. I think it should be possible--especially with todays large amounts of memory, but I haven't explored enough of the kernel's insides to know the size of the job. That is partly why I was so inclined to believe / wanted to believe your post. :-D
I haven't switched to 2.6 yet. I have it downloaded, I just need to compile and install it. So I haven't tried the /dev/hd? way with cdrecord. I don't think it would make things more confusing, since that is the way I specify the drive everywhere else...should be less confusing. Then again I've never had any real SCSI devices, so...