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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
If his new license is not compatible with Debian goals, ideals, etc, and they cant agree in a common point, ok, substitute his package for another with a more Debian-like license in that particular distribution, but is not like he became the evil lord of darkness and must be despised by everyone. We all have too much to thank to him for all what he did already.
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
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!
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
The problem is not that he is not using the GPL. The problem is that he has accepted GPL'd patches and licensed something containing them under a GPL-incompatible license. If Debian distributed the application, they would be violating the copyright of the authors of the GPL'd components.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's simple: Take e.g. the original BSD license. It is incompatible with GPL due to an additional restriction (advertising clause). OTOH it allows you many things which the GPL does not allow you (like linking with proprietary code), so it's arguably more free than GPL.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The 'scg' library (which cdrecord uses to access the CD drives) predates Linux by several years and Linux is only one of the several OS's supported by cdrecord. FWIW, Linux has its share of "I'll do it my way" ideas by Linus and the other developers.
If I write code under a BSD license, anyone can use make use it. GPL, BSD, CDDL, even proprietary closed source code. Everyone has freedom.
GPL code is only free for use with other GPL code.
GPL gives you freedom the same way segregation gives you freedom -- freedom for some, not all.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
Hey, he's not the evil lord of darkness for his CDDL switch, although the mixing of CDDL and GPL code together and lying about how it's allowed does suggest satanic tendencies.
Jörg is the evil lord of darkness for his DVD fork of cdrecord, called cdrecord.ProDVD, which has the most egregiously fascist licensing restrictions ever. Basically, every few months, you have to go over to Jörgy's site and beg for a license key otherwise your DVD burner just stops working. If he gets hit by a bus, or his site goes down or you lose internet access or he decides to be even more of a control-freak asshole than he is already, then you're out of luck and the software stops working.
Not only that, but the fucker uses cdrecord to brag that the proDVD patch is the bee's knees and that the other DVD burners are buggy unofficial pieces of crap. That way naïve users fall into his trap and actually download and use this fascist trash, thereby depriving themselves of freedom 0 almost as soon as they manage to liberate themselves from Windows. xcdroast compounds the error by recommending it too, fuckers.
cdrecord.ProDVD does a great job of making its users helpless and dependent. Worst.Software. Ever. -10.5/10
GPL advocates will tell you that the GPL is more free than the BSD license because of the extra restrictions in the GPL. Obviously the next step is to add more restrictions to make it even freer! :)
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)
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.
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.
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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.
The interaction of the GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses is well understood and works well.
There's no problem at all linking GPL software with libraries of either. Same goes with the apache license and perl's artistic license.
Sun's license isn't GPL-friendly, and even if there's a question about it, debian needs to find a way around it. This is the way debian works - it's all in the social contract. It's a pain sometimes, but there's distros out there who don't worry so much about licensing issues you can use if you're concerned.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I pity that fool whose name messes my firefox live bookmark.
No.
Free, in the case of the GPL, does not mean that *you* as the user of software are free to do whatever you want with it. Sorry.
Free software: think a "free people."
You can't use them as slaves, and their children are free too.
Your point is interesting, but wrong.
It's GPL'ed.
He _could_ have a trademark on the name "cdrtools", but they are distributing with another name, so that's not even an issue.
This is what you commit to, when you stamp the GPL on your code.
Users are free to fork your work, and they are even protected from your own nonsense.
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.
he released the dvd code by now.
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.
Agreed
It's like saying that everything installed on a (Windows) PC by an OEM is under the Windows EULA.
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
Yes, my freedom is restricted in the way that I cannot restrict the freedom of other people. This is less freedom for me. No, I don't complain, because this also means that I'm safe (or at least much safer) against losing the freedom I do enjoy. So this restriction of my freedom is actually good (well, actually the good part for me is the restriction of the freedom of others to take my freedom; of course the others will enjoy the fact that my freedom to take their freedom is restricted this way just as much).
And yes, freedom does mean to be free to do what you want (the free people are free because they can do what they want, that is they are not slaves who are told what they must do).
Your problem is that you mechanically imply "more free = better" and then, after seeing that a certain less free option is actually better, because it ensures the continuation of that freedom, you try to redefine "free" only to not need to change your original implication.
Just accept that the world is not that simple, and that sometimes the less free option is the better one, if the restriction of the freedom helps persistance of the remaining freedom, and you can stop trying to redefine "free" only to match your wrong assertion to the real world.
Yes, the GPL is less free than the BSD license. And yes, it is better exacty due to being less free in the right way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
The reasoning is fallacious, and I think other replies don't clearly phrase the issue.
When Schilling released cdrools under the GPL, he then granted whoever received it under that license (e.g., Debian) the right to redistribute under the GPL. This cannot be revoked.
However, he can relicense the code he owns the copyright to. But, that license only applies to subsequent distributions of his code, not to distributions under the old copyright.
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.
Technically, he can relicense older GPL-licensed versions as well. However, that in no way revokes the GPL licensing on those same versions.
e.g. I release foo 1.0, and foo 1.1 under GPL, then decide to take my marbles home and release foo 1.2 under some proprietary license. That's legit, and I can even release 1.0 under that same proprietary license as well if I want to. However, the fact that 1.0 was already GPL'd means there's no way to un-GPL it.
More data, damnit!
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.
Because they're not using GPL, MIT, BSD, X11, etc. They're using non-OSI-approved licenses, which is what the actual problem is here.
Corollary to Godwin's law: you are an idiot.
See, no one is dying over these license conflicts. Not even any software is dying, it's just not being distributed by certain people.
As for Nazi-mentality, the Nazis (well, mostly Hitler) wanted to kill people over something quite ridiculous, their genetic background. Meanwhile, the supporters of the GPL want to promote freedom. They're not trying to legislate it, and they're not forcing you to use their licenses. They have an actual ideological dispute with supporters of other licenses, and they are doing something about it. Meanwhile, I doubt you have ever done anything more important than eat, breathe, and shit. LIVE, CONSUME, DIE, TAXPAYER!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only way he could assert his copyright over the people who he distributed it to under the GPL (or who other people, who are also permitted to distribute it under this license, have done so) is if the entire GPL were invalidated, in which case the whole thing would revert to being controlled simply by Copyright law. At that point, he would have to remove any code contributed to his projects without an explicit release of copyright from the author, or be violating copyright separately for every modification, so everyone would lose, except businesses or other entities which use no GPL code. Well, they lose too, but not in such an obvious way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
> Everyone has freedom.
Very true. Everyone also has the freedom to *take that freedom away*. That is the only thing that the GPL was intended to limit (afaik). It's a safe-keep for freedom. *That* is the restriction, too my understanding.
Naming the GPL restrictive is like saying laws cannot be used to safe-keep freedom.
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.
It's a pain sometimes, but there's distros out there who don't worry so much about licensing issues you can use if you're concerned.
Sober and useful advice to anyone conflicted about Debian license policy. Now, go forth, you whinnies, don't let the door hit your ass, but it will, cuz i'm kicking it from the other side.
Yes, just like you can't use GPL software on Windows or Mac OS X....
Microsoft is famous for not allowing OEMs to bundle competing software. It was part of the basis for the Netscape/monopoly lawsuit. Legally, Microsoft can put whatever restrictions they want on the distribution of their software, though due to their monopoly position they've run into trouble doing that.
I don't see how GPL is any different. It depends if you think the bundled software is "mere agrregation" or if it is "part of a whole which is a work based on the Program". I'd argue, for example, that when Red Hat makes an "enterprise" version of Linux, they're selling the OS as a single work, derived from GPL software.
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations, you have successfully committed an etymological fallacy. It is obvious from the context that he was not indicating he thought anyone was a homosexual. Some would say that the transition of the definition of the word 'gay' would be subject to the same complaint you've just used of the word faggot. It's a crap argument. He was obviously using it as a simple pejorative.
If you want a suggestion for making your life happier, don't use your politics to interpret other people's meanings. Take them as they come.
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.
It might be well understood _now_ but it took a few years (see below) - and _you_ clearly still haven't got it. Read http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPL
I'll help you with some bits of it: Apache is GPL incompatible because of patent clause. As is CDDL. Artistic licence is not even "free software" let alone GPL compatible.
As for BSD... where do we even start....
Well, let's try. Once upon a time, some years ago, some people thought it was compatible - despite an obvious "additional restriction".
They thought the restriction should be ignored because it wasn't enforceable or something (although the GPL doesn't say you can ignore restrictions for that reason).
They mixed GPL and BSD code merrily and distributed it everywhere.
Then they got some legal advice - no, BSD (orginal) and GPL were (are) NOT compatible.
Oops, wonder what they did then ? Did they remove the offending code, did they get kicked from Debian, did they stop distributing ?
Er, no. They:
Denied it. Ignored it. Disagreed on it. Denied it again (usenet archives remember even better than I do). Hoped it would go away.
Some years later, they got the BSD licence changed to be GPL compatible (remove advertising clause), and went round changing all the licence notices on other people's code to the new version. Presumably they got explicit permission to do that...
They still distribute the old illegal packages with the original incompatible licences, even today.
So, can we kick these licence cowboys off Debian for this outrageous disregard of the GPL ?
Probably not - after all, they are/were the GNU maintainers...
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.
Let's say Microsoft takes some BSD code. I'm no worse off. You're no worse off. BSD is no worse off. Nobody is worse off. And nobody has lost any freedom because of it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
/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).
"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".
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.
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 thought it was "Those who can't teach, teach others how to teach." -- certainly seemed that way when I was going to state teachers college back in the late 50s early 60s...
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.
Yes, the users of the Microsoft have lost the freedom to modify, fix bugs or security issues, or port the code to a different platform. GPL is about the freedom of the *users*. And your scenario is a perfect example where the end user does lose freedom. I'm not against BSD, but I want us to be clear what freedoms we are talking about.
Almost right.
You can stop distributing version 1.0 under the GPL but that doesn't invalidate all the already distributed copies.
You can hope, though, that those copies will die out one day...
See my blog for my free opinions.
"Linux" *isn't* supported by the library. Linux 2.4 with the ide-scsi module does not count.
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?
Yes, but it doesn't mean that the bundled software is under Windows' license, just because MS says you can or can't pre-install competitor X's products. If (as many OEMs do) you bundle MS Office with MS Windows on a PC, that doesn't mean that MS Office is governed by the MS Windows license, or vice-versa. It is "mere aggregation".
The point is that Microsoft, as copyright holder, gets to say under what terms Windows may be redistributed. At one time Microsoft said that you can't bundle Netscape with Windows. The GPL says that you can't create derivative works with it's software, unless that software is also GPL.
What is "mere aggregation" vs a derivative work is up to the copyright holders and courts to decide. I think my Red Hat "enterprise" example is a good one that goes beyond "mere aggregation".
The end user is in the same position [insert joke about bending over and grabbing ankles] if MS uses BSD code or if MS writes the code themselves. The original BSD code is still freely available to anyone that wants it. If the user wanted your "freedom" they wouldn't be using a closed source product in the first place.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
> 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.
Possibly you're right about Firefox...though you wouldn't have been a year ago. I use SeaMonkey, which is under this license:
...
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/
Mozilla & Netscape Public Licenses
This page details the licenses under which Mozilla source code can be obtained. All of the code which makes up the core Mozilla products is licensed under a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license or a licence compatible with all three of those (e.g. the BSD licence). Other code in our repository may have different licensing terms.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You're not redistributing it if you wrote it. You're distributing it. There is no 're-'. 'You' is very specifically defined to be someone other than the software's author by the license.
The GPL is a license which grants people other than the author certain rights, including redistribution. It requires certain things in exchange for those rights, including the terms of that redistribution.
Schilling cannot be told he cannot choose a different license for new code he wrote just because he released the old code it goes with was previously released under a different license. The new code he wrote can be licensed any way he wants. He can release the old code under that license too. The only question becomes what other people can do with what he had already released under the old license.
Debian has code which was licensed to them under the GPL. They are planning to use that to make a derivative work under the GPL. I don't see anything anywhere in the GPL saying that the copyright holder cannot revoke the license of a third party, only that the redistributor cannot.
I don't see anything here other than speculation about Schilling planning to revoke the GPL on the older, GPL-licensed code that Debian plans to fork in the first place. It's reasonable speculation about what could possibly happen, but it's still speculation.
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?
"You're not redistributing it if you wrote it. You're distributing it."
Maybe that's why the GPL says "distribute" and not "redistribute" (see i.e. 2B: "You must cause any work that you DISTRIBUTE or publish..." -my remark).
"The GPL is a license which grants people other than the author certain rights"
Of course, since the author already had such rights to begin with.
"Schilling cannot be told he cannot choose a different license for new code"
Nobody has said anything diferent.
"Debian has code which was licensed to them under the GPL"
By who? The author? Any "third party" that LEGALLY got the code "somewhere else"? If *you* didn't pass me the code *you* have no bussiness about what can I do with it (provided I got the code legally).
"I don't see anything anywhere in the GPL saying that the copyright holder cannot revoke the license of a third party, only that the redistributor cannot."
You won't see that the author can revoke it unless some very specific situations are met (basically, the unability from the distributor side to abide to the GPL and some other law/patent grant, etc.). Regarding its conditions a license is no different from a contract: two parts stablished a relationship and from that moment on them both are abode to respect it. You (the distributor) acorded to give me a non-limited license for redistribution; you *must* respect this. I (the licensee) acorded the redistribution to be in such and such terms; I *must* respect them.
"I don't see anything here other than speculation about Schilling planning to revoke the GPL"
Well, I wouldn't say this specific thread is about Schilling doing this or that but about the general case regarding if these kinds of things can or cannot be done.
Go fuck yourself, Joerg.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Not this one, because the license terms themselves:
Sorry, but that's simply not correct. The terms you indicate do not have the effect you describe.
This is based on the law outside the contract. I was stating that there's nothing in the GPL that states specifically that the author can't. So, in effect, the author could under any circumstances acceptable within standard, accepted contract law. You're right that those would be narrow, and it's probably good to point that out.
Anyone who tried to distribute the newer versions under the GPL would be in violation of both licenses, so their rights under both licensess would be pretty much revoked on those grounds. The older versions that are fully GPL shouldn't be a problem, which is why Debian is using those. Anyone who had a copy of the GPLed version can redistribute the GPLed version freely. They are not entitled to additions and derivations made by the original author and released under the new license just because the old code is GPLed.
The author of a GPLed bit of code can at any time make new versions that are not GPLed. The author is not bound by having released a GPLed version to license his derivative works under the GPL, because the GPL is not what gave him the rights to make those derivative works. The posting earlier about people being required to give licenses to third parties of any derivative works could be taken out of context. They do not have anything to do with the rights of the original author, but only the rights of licensees.
> 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.
Of course the freedoms to the original code cannot be taken away. But the GPL talks about *all* users of the code, modified or not. And surely, a user of the Microsoft product cannot fix any security issues at all. And that is an important freedom that the GPL stops you from taking away from users. Developers may get a bit less freedom, but users get more, for that very reason.
> 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.
"Sorry, but that's simply not correct. The terms you indicate do not have the effect you describe."
Of course not, silly me! Thanks for enlighting us.
You do realize that because he posted in the thread, even as an AC, he can't use his modpoints? You need to use much more vague terminology(putting it on one person is impossible) and also, DocRuby did it much betterly.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I think you mean: "go fork yourself, Joerg".
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.
Sorry about that, I misphrased. MIT and BSD licenses can be linked to by GPL software with no issues. The artistic and apache licenses are well understood as far as their interaction with the GPL, and pretty much no one argues about the legal points on them. I didn't mean to say they could be linked, but I'll agree that's certainly what I typed. Chalk that up to sloppy proofreading.
The BSD license change has been gone over as well. Some code still uses the old, non GPL-compatible license, but anything that belongs to berkely can use the new license, so it's perfectly within debian's rights to change the license in the code. Stuff still using the old license with "regents of berkely" changed to something else of course isn't GPL compatible and debian would have to have the copyright holder's permission to change it.
Anyway, debian does try to do the right thing. It doesn't always happen, but no group of people is perfect. Without having been involved during these discussions you're talking about, I can't really say one way or the other about it, but I would imagine removing all BSD code from debian would have rendered the system inoperable for a while. Not as bad as 4.4BSD, but there's a _lot_ of BSD code in there... The only real solution is to make the current debian leadership aware and have them correct it, or get the copyright owners to start up a fuss.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Actually, I'm a Guardian reader. But I do enjoy Mail Watch.
I just don't buy the argument that limiting freedoms increases freedom.
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.
I'll clarify too - it's the FSF/GNU maintainers I think behaved poorly over BSD/GPL (the original BSD which is not GPL compatible), not Debian.
Debian doesn't get it right all the time, but they don't tend to completely ignore the problem and they do take difficult decisions like pulling code from the distribution.
It is also reasonable for Debian to expect that core GNU packages actually developed and distributed by the FSF would be ok by the GPL.
The FSF on the other hand just seemed to ignore (and deny) the problem (that they were shipping GPL mixed with BSD(original) in violation of the GPL) for years. Worse still, as the copyright holder and maintainer of the gpl, they could have actually fixed it (something Debian usually can't do). Simply add a special exception to allow BSD(original) to the GPL on the code in question or on the GPL itself, but (usenet allegedly) the advertising clause was considered too "obnoxious" to be legitemized in this way. Not IMO a great example for the originators of the GPL to ahve set the rest of the world.
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...