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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The debian folks are being far too nice about this. I don't for the life of me understand why this guy has been tollerated for so long. He is a major reason why CD burning is more of a pain than it should be in Linux. While CDRtools may be free the DVD writing tools from the same author are not. There is also the problem of CDRtools author pendantically sticking to his SCSI interface library and refusing to use any kernel interface other than the IDE-SCSI kernel interface because the other interfaces don't support CPU access or flatbed scanners (I'm not kidding) even though CDRtools is the only real user of that library. He is so stuck on the (0,0,0) interface format what when someone pointed out that device names work he imediatly announced he would add code to remove that ability. He has also been known to add strange delay loops and refuses to remove uneeded/obsolete warnings when interfacing with Linux.