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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.
There are some software that say or 'gpl v2 or any later version' but if even 1 package (ie: the kernel) doesn't say that, then the whole distro can forget it.
What are you talking about? A distro is "mere aggregation" which is allowed by the GPL. Debian includes software with GPL-incompatible licenses, such as Apache.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Combining previously contributed 3rd-party GPLed code with your own (recently-relicensed-to) CCDL code is quite certainly a way to end up with a combined product which isn't legally redistributable.
As of now, Sun's Common Development and Distribution License is not accepted under the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Combing GPL code with a GPL-incompatible license produces code that cannot be distributed. The GPL v2 specifies, you cannot add further restrictions, so if I combine this with code with a license that adds further restrictions, the code can no longer be distributed under the GPL. If I don't have permission from all the GPL contributers to relicense their code, I cannot legally redistribute the combined work. This is pretty much the entire point of copyleft.
Since the latest cdrtools packages look to be a combination of GPL'd code and incompatibly licensed code, Debian is removing crtools (not shunting it to non-free), because they feel they can no longer distribute the work.
Yep, MPL==Mozilla Public License. The MPL is incompatible with the GPL because MPL'd code can be combined with proprietary code. FSF says that MPL has "some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL." To get around this potential problem, Mozilla licenses all of their code under the MPL, GPL and LGPL (a so called tri-license).
See MPL for more details.
I wonder why Schilling doesn't just dual-license? (I did RFTA)
Rankmaniac 2010
> Linux 2.6 doesn't need cdrecord
--I beg to differ. Cdrecord has the ability to:
o Access remote SCSI devices
o Blank CDRW media
o Write "cloned" images created from ' readcd -clone '
o Write multi-session CDs
o Write Audio CDs
o Write using "burnfree" buffer-underrun technology
o Set different Write speeds
o Overburn
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
And Debian is based on releasing only GPL'd or GPL-compatibly-licensed softwares.
Er, no. Debian is based on releasing only software which conforms to the debian free-software guidelines. Says nothing about the GPL in there, other than that the GPL conforms to these guidelines. They also release software under the artistic license, which isn't even free software, according to the FSF's definition, let alone GPL-compatible.
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.
Reread the parent. He said that a project that has both code licensed only under the GPL and code only licensed with {a license incompatible with the GPL} cannot be in Debian, because it would be illegal to distribute.
This isn't about putting Apache and GNU C in the same distribution. It's about putting filemanager.c and documentview.c in the same binary when filemanager.c is licensed under the XGL, and documentview.c is licensed under the XGL-incompatible YGL. That's the core of the problem here.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Once a piece of code has been released under a license (such as the GPL), you cannot retroactively change that license (ie tell people they can no longer distribute it under that license)
It works like this: The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. Schilling doesn't want to believe it is, but both the CDDL and GPL writers (and anyone with half a brain) say otherwise. So while he's perfectly within his rights to distribute source code that combines CDDL & GPL code (as he is doing now), as soon as you build that source code and distribute the result (as any binary distribution does), you've just violated the GPL's 'no additional restrictions' clause.
The forked code was GPL'd, you cannot revoke GPL once it's given. Jorg has no say in how his GPL'd code is used, modified or distributed provided it is in accordance with the GPL version with which it was released.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
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.
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
Heh. He also has his own make version for some reason. Also, IIRC cdrecord doesn't (or didn't) support DVD recording except through a propietary program made by schilling. You needed to pay him money in order to get a license and a key. People had to code opens-source DVD extensions, and distros had to patch the cdrecord source with those extensions.
And then, there's the dev= issue. Schilling insist that the "right way" of using your burner is by passing the dev=1,2,3 argument, instead of dev=/dev/foo, and that the "right thing" to do is not to use a kernel interface to use the burner, but to let cdrecord internal libraries to access directly to the IDE/SCSI bus, like in the good old DOS days. When Suse patched their cdrecord version to use dev=/dev/foo directly, he wrote a linuxcheck() function that printks a warning when you're using a 2.6 kernel, and he "sub-licensed" that function with a GPL-incompatible statement: "you can't remove this function", just to try to force Suse and Redhat to include it.
It's not really a similar situation at all. Joerg was SELLING dvdrecord-pro, as a commercial app, with no open source equivalent. To get free DVD-burning, there was little choice but to take cdrecord/mkisofs and extend it to DVDs.
dvdrtools was branched off a while ago, and the most recent changes have not been merged from cdrtools.
Last I checked, dvdrtools wasn't as good as cdrtools in specific cases, like burning from bin/cue files.
dvdrtools is very similar, but isn't a 100% compatible, drop-in replacement for users, and applications that use it, as this debian fork is meant to be.
Besides, this fork may just be a short-term measure, which seems likely, as they are planning on integrating it immediately.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't have access to much posting history. (didn't pay) I'm certainly not the only "r00t" on the net; I have no reason to believe "eviltypeguy" is unique either. Not even CmdrTaco is unique. Based on the English, I started to suspect that you might not be Joerg. About the only other person who agrees with Joerg is the xcdrecord author, so I figure that there is a good chance you wrote cdrecord.
But OK. I suppose I can believe Joerg has more than one fan. You're #2.
From personal experience, I know that taking over a project is quite a lot of work. (if you run Linux, you almost certainly run my code every day) Taking over a project involving lots of poorly-documented hardware is nearly insane. I've considered it though!
Lots of people have wanted to fork cdrecord. I pretty much did, but never made the first release. Cleaning up the crud would be horribly painful. Joerg has rolled many other projects into cdrecord, including mkisofs. So you can't just maintain the one program. If you drop the others, then you aren't providing a full replacement. Joerg keeps critical info in his head. The source does not include enough comments to tell why certain odd things are being done. You'd have to just make mistakes, pissing users off with ruined media. Since cdrecord does not provide a sane interface for wrapper programs, you have to maintain the old crap right down to the very last space character. You'd have to burn lots of media, which is like burning dollars. Grab a few dollars out of your wallet and set them on fire. Now do it again. Again, and again, and again...
"OpenSolaris however _is_ a real threat for Linux. OpenSolaris gives more freedom than Linux, it gives new impressing features and there is marketing.
It seems that the reason for the FUD against OpenSolaris published by Linux people is caused by the fact that product of value and freedom found in Linux is smaller than the product of value and freedom available with OpenSolaris."
Among other humourous things.
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
Not to worry. Firefox is available under GPL. MPL was never widely used outside of Mozilla, and that chiefly in the period before Mozilla was widely used. At that, it's a better license than the CDDL. The CDDL specificly allows distribution of binaries that depend on proprietary licenses of various forms. One of the forms would make the source code visible, and not clearly warn users that it was dependant on having licensed certain software patents...i.e., that the end-users were liable if they didn't properly license the patents required to use the software, and the company could know about it and not warn you.
The MPL protected against that. The CDDL removed that protection. So, I ask myself, *why* would Sun make such a change? (I asked Sun, too. They never responded...which doesn't prove anything.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
Once a piece of code has been released under a license (such as the GPL), you cannot retroactively change that license (ie tell people they can no longer distribute it under that license)
That is not entirely correct. You can legally revoke a license at any time. "License" is just a legal term for "permission" or "consent", and you can withdraw permission and consent, and so can withdraw a license. Nevertheless, if you try enforcing that revocation in a court you are likely to run into issues of estoppel. In simple terms, if somebody has relied on the license in a way that would make it unconscionable for you to withdraw it, the court will hold you to the terms even though you may have revoked it.
With GPL software, where somebody else has relied on the license and produced non-trivially derivative works (or even non-derivative works that depend on the GPL software) then withdrawing the license would be unconscionable because they have expended significant effort (capital expenditure) in reliance on the license which is lost if the license to the original software is revoked. It may also be that if other people have refrained from developing equivalent software because of the existence of this particular GPL software, then it would be taken as unconscionable to withraw the license, at least until such time as equivalent software can be produced.
On the other hand, to use an extreme example, say you have produced something and released it under the GPL, but nobody has used it. You could revoke the GPL on that software at any time. You could also revoke the GPL at any time if there is a readily available substitute provided nobody has produced any derivative work.
While it is quite common to say that you cannot revoke the GPL on a piece of software once released, this is not literally true. While in many cases this will be the situation for all practical purposes, the general rule is more complex, and in the right circumstances it is possible to revoke it.
Um, no. That's how we'd expect it to work. We'd expect it to honor the permissions of the device file. But Joerg's SCSI library doesn't use the device file -- it issues SCSI commands directly to the SCSI interface.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
"That is not entirely correct. You can legally revoke a license at any time."
...and...
Not this one, because the license terms themselves:
"2.b) ou must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions."
Given them both together it means that while it might be within your powers to revoke the license to those you directly distributed to (since it's a matter about *you* and someone else, and even then, as you properly stated, it will be quite difficult to convince a judge you can break the confidence of your licensees without a really strong reason), you can't deal on something that it is not your bussiness, that is, the deal among "second tier" redistributors and their receptors. So you, as most, can avoid people that recieved copies directly from you to further redistribute, but you won't be able to avoid redistribution from people that didn't get the code from you, much less those that got the code neither from you nor you direct "clients".