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 [e-mail]. Here is our svn repository.

I believe

They told him to fork off.

Re:The copyright is still with Schilling

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.

Re:The copyright is still with Schilling

"That is not entirely correct. You can legally revoke a license at any time."

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. ...and...
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".

Re:The copyright is still with Schilling

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.

Ouch

I understand dropping his package, but kicking him? Man, I don't want to upset the Debian team.

Re:Ouch

Better than kicking his package. Ouch!

I don't really see the point.

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 [arklinux.org] ) ( server seems to be down at the moment ).

Re:I don't really see the point.

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

I've wondered about Debian

Won't the GPLv3 be incompatible with the GPL?

Re:I've wondered about Debian

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.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

As of now, Sun's Common Development and Distribution License [wikipedia.org] is not accepted under the Debian Free Software Guidelines [wikipedia.org].

Re:I've wondered about Debian

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 [debian.org]. 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.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

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.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

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.

While I agree with the first part, Joerg is a huge PITA and doesn't listen to anyone that doesn't already agree with thim. The last part is wrong, from what I read he's recently put the DVD burning code into the CDDL'd cdrecord code so you don't need is cdrecord-prodvd crap anymore.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

The potential for closed corporate forking is grounds for kicking and forking to GPL?

First of all, arguably the author himself forked when he began to use a new license. He himself created a CDDL fork from the GPL version. This is simply a reversion to the GPL version.

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

Short form: If you don't like their politics, don't run their distribution. Case closed.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

if even 1 package (ie: the kernel) doesn't say that, then the whole distro can forget it.

Can forget what? Every distro that I know of contains software with many different licenses. The only thing it prevents is taking code from a GPL v2 (without the 'any later version' clause) and putting it in a GPL v3 package. It doesn't say anything about running GPL3 apps on a GPL2 kernel, or CDDL apps on a GPL2 kernel, or BSD apps on a GPL2 kernel.

Re:I've wondered about Debian

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.

Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License?

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.

Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License?

Yes it is the Mozilla Public License. From the "GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses" section of one of the links posted in the summary/article:

Mozilla Public License (MPL)

This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason.

However, MPL 1.1 has a provision (section 13) that allows a program (or parts of it) to offer a choice of another license as well. If part of a program allows the GNU GPL as an alternate choice, or any other GPL-compatible license as an alternate choice, that part of the program has a GPL-compatible license.

Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License?

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.)

Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License?

I wonder why Schilling doesn't just dual-license?

Because Schilling is a Sun fanboi. See his blog [blogspot.com] for details..

"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.

Still squabbling I guess

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.

Re:Still squabbling I guess

Try "legal" and "illegal". If two licenses are incompatible, then it is illegal to distribute software written under both together. So it's illegal for Debian to distribute the CDDL licensed bits of cdrecord with the GPL licensed bits. This isn't squabbling about the definition of free, it's about protecting a volunteer project with no money from being sued.

Re:Still squabbling I guess

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.

MPL not allowed in Debian?

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?

Re:MPL not allowed in Debian?

But as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Debian includes other non-GPL compatible licensed software in its distribution like Apache, openssl, PHP for a few examples. Why be so specific about CDDL incompatibilty? Or is this just an issue about a clash of personalities?

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.

CDDL

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.

Re:CDDL

If Sun releases their VM under CDDL, it will still be free software.

Some pigs are more equal than others.

Re:CDDL is free

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.

Re:CDDL

t's funny because when the Apache Software Foundation has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, no one gave them grief, but SUN moves to one and suddenly they're evil...

Debian actually quietly engaged the Apache Foundation about their license too and worked to resolve issues there as well.

Re:CDDL

Debian actually quietly engaged the Apache Foundation about their license too and worked to resolve issues there as well.

really ? someone needs to tell the FSF then, because they still list all the apache licenses as incompatible http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#G PLIncompatibleLicenses [fsf.org].

no offence intended, you may be a lawyer etc., but I trust the FSF website on this a lot more than someone posting on /. after all, part of the problem here is that Jörg Schilling has been going with his own thoughts on which licences are GPL (in)compatible instead of listening to the relevant experts.

so, until someone credible says otherwise, the GP is right, the Apache Software Foundation does have a license that is incompatible with the GPL. furthermore, since it's been so, and been known to be so, for a number of versions, it is unlikely that this incompatibility is accidental.

on that basis they deserve at least as much grief about it as Sun.

Re:CDDL

> 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

Re:CDDL

"If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's? You make it sound like Joerg was all hot air, and not a extremely technically cable person."

Who said anything about technical capability?

Well, I will: Joerg is moderately capable. His advantage is that he personally owns many expensive and out-of-production burners, and that his employer (the lovely MP3 patent holders) he has an unusual ability to get vendors to cooperate in giving out hardware information under NDA.

Joerg is a stubborn bone-headed idiot when it comes to user interface, hardware abstractions, and portability. He has the gall to claim that users actually like to specify all burners by a 1980s-style set of three numbers, and that users actually like running the -scanbus option instead of just using /dev/burner (or /dev/white-sony-drive, etc.) for the name. See the linux-kernel mailing list for some great flamewars, many involving Linus and many which lead to somebody catching Joerg in a lie.

So... are you Joerg, or are you his buddy the xcdroast author? That program too is a piece of shit. I've seen the code. It has buffer overflows. It doesn't abstract out the interface to the burner program. All over the code one can find ugly little bits of buggy cdrecord output parsing code, mixed right in with the GUI widgets. That's not how competant people write programs, excepting throw-away hacks.

Re:CDDL

This doesn't surprise me in light of my experience with some of his other projects. On several occasions I've come upon one of his projects on Freshmeat and been interested enough to try to build it. This has generally been problematic. He has his own configuration and build system. It isn't necessarily bad - it may even have some advantages - but it is idiosyncratic and in my experience a pain to use. When I've examined the specifics of his project I usually find that the differences between it and the more standard version (several of his projects are variants of standard utilities, e.g. his count [freshmeat.net] is a variant of wc) aren't sufficiently interesting to me to make the hassle of his build system worthwhile, or that they lack features of other variants that are important for my purposes. (His count, for example, is said to be faster than GNU wc, but doesn't understand Unicode.)

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.

Re:CDDL

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 [mozillazine.org] 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.

Re:CDDL

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...

Re:CDDL

> He has the gall to claim that users actually like to specify all burners by a 1980s-style set of three numbers,

Hey - I actually thought it to be normal.
Because, in FreeBSD-land, there's camcontrol(8) devlist, which gives you exactly these numbers.
Also, some people may have more than one burner. The above makes it very obvious, which one is the right one.

> and that users actually like running the -scanbus option instead of just using /dev/burner

It's a legacy, maybe - but just try to find a command in Linux to rescan your SCSI-bus.
Well, there isn't. Instead, you are supposed to echo some values into certain parts of the procfs, or run some vendor-specific script.
Wow, l33t. Impressive. *That's* what I call a hack.

Yes, cdrecord is still living in SCSI-land - but this is the only cross-platform (API-) stable peripheral interface that works on almost any unix-platform.
Nowadays, too much open-source software is full of code that assume that everybody=linux - or those stupid install-scripts that assume sh=bash.
I *loathe* them.

And, as someone else pointed out: if it would be so easy-peasy to code a cdrecord replacement, somebody would have done it already.
But apparently, some people prefer to fight over licences, rather than actually produce code...
(This is not to put down the OpenBSD-project, who also fight for free-ness of code - but they actually go the extra-mile and have the guts to start from scratch, if it is necessary. In Linux-land, forking a GPLed older version seems to be de-rigeur - any counter-examples?)

Re:CDDL

If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's?

You make it sound like Joerg was all hot air, and not a extremely technically cable person.

Being a good developer and "letting success go to one's head" don't rule each other out.

anything to do with matt garrett quiting?

I wonder if this has anything to do with him recently quiting? It seems that debian has been taking one hit after another lately.

What Danese Cooper says is wrong

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.

Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong

I appreciate your comments explaining another perspective on this issue. It's always good to have as many angles represented on contentious issues. However, your points are not really germane to the story.

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.

This does not contradict the stance holding that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL.

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.

This has nothing to do with the license.

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.

In light of this, it would be an act in the name of consistency to further exclude other CDDL projects. It seems you are arguing for the inconsistency to be applied to cdrtools rather than fighting for greater consistency. A predictable reaction to the situation you describe could be to acknowledge the problems between the CDDL and the GPL and frame the controversy in this way, but when projects with incompatible licenses point to other problems in Debians inclusion choices in order to slip themselves through the gate it just poisons the well further rather than attempting to help satisfy Debian's goals.

Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong

"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."

Danese Cooper is the primary author of the CDDL; if there's anyone who knows the CDDL, it's her.

In the video linked in the article (from May of this year), she does indeed say that the CDDL is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, and the Sun employee also in the discussion (Sun's free software community relations guy) confirms this.

In the video it's explained that the Solaris development community didn't want to release the code under the GPL, and if Sun had done so prominent developers were ready to quit. Also in the video, she explains that Sun modelled the CDDL on the Mozilla Public License intentionally with the hopes that the Mozilla community would adopt it, and that the CDDL was left incompatible with the GPL partially to appeal to the Mozilla community.

What about dvdrtools?

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 [wikipedia.org]. In fact, dvdrtools is already a debian package [debian.org]. Why did they need another fork?

Re:What about dvdrtools?

I thought that someone already forked this long ago because of problems with Joerg Schilling mucking around with the license?

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.

Why did they need another fork?

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.

Just an excuse

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.

GPL incompatable now means not free?

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'.

Re:GPL incompatable now means not free?

GPL-incompatible means GPL incompatible, not non-free. This is really not hard to understand.

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.

XV

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.

about time

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.

Now get rid of the delay...

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.

But it belongs to Schilling, does it not?

If so, then he can use any license he wants. He could wrap it in the User Must Wear Chicken Suit License if he so desires.

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.

Re:But it belongs to Schilling, does it not?

The problem is that he has wrapped parts of his software package in two different, incompatible licences... if you like to continue the chicken suit analogy

1. You may distribute this software only if you wear a chicken suit
and 2. You may distribute this software only if you do not wear a chicken suit

so Jorg says you cannot distribute the software unless you both do, and do not, at the same time, wear a chicken suit. Fairly obviously, in this universe, distributing software under those conditions would be somewhat impossible.

The deb maintainers have tried to show Jorg this problem, but he is unwilling to change the situation, and as a result the only way that deb can legitimately distribute this software is to fork it from before the second licence was imposed and continue development themselves.

Basically, they've given Jorg every opportunity to correct the problem so he can continue to have his package legally distributed by debian, he's refused for whatever reason, and so debian has NO CHOICE but to fork it, drop it, or distribute it illegally. They chose rightly to fork it.

Incompatibility

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.

Like XFree86?

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.

Why Jörg, why ?...

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.

Good for Jorg...

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.

Re:Good for Jorg...

Good for Jorg to stick to his guns. He can choose whatever license he wants to release his code under.

Of course he is. This freedom extends to releasing code that nobody else can legally use. A CDDL build system+GPL codebase isn't legal for anyone else but Jorg to distribute. More power to him.

It wasn't just the license

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.

Re:It wasn't just the license

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.

So it went something like this?

cdrecord dev=1,0,0 -eject schilling.iso

404 Anyone got a working link for that video?

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 [debian.net] gives me a 404.

Anyone got a working URL? Thanks.

Joerg's position

Why didn't the author include Joerg's position on this? He didn't even provide a link to his hompage:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.ht ml [berlios.de]

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 /.) could comment on that one, since I am not a kernel hacker.

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 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?

most kernel developers strongly disagree

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.

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 /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.

Joerg wants to use an obsolete backdoor. He doesn't use the normal device names or the normal CD/DVD driver. He uses the /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.

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.

Good riddance!

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.

Gentlemen, please!

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.

Gentoo is starting to really piss me off.

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 name

I pity that fool whose name messes my firefox live bookmark.

Why does it have to be GPL-compatible?

Is this part of the kernel? Does every package that is part of Debian have to be GPL-compatible?
Apache's license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Apache is a Debian package. The Latex license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Latex is available for Debian without a fork.
(see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLI ncompatibleLicenses [gnu.org])

So what is the problem here?

Finally!

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 [debian.org] 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.

Paying Jörg Doesn't Work Either

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.

This is all about makefiles!

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.

Sad and "unethical", but nothing illegal

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?

Stupid headline

The headline should read: "Debian forks cdrtools"

Of course, that wouldn't be news, because Debian forks things all the time.

Its all free

As far as im concerned, licenses are irrelevant anyway and i can do what ever i please.

What's wrong with SCSI?

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

W.A.I.P.

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.

Good.

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.

Debian maintainers take ball and go home

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.

*applause*

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).

So what do I use?

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...

Why is GPL-compatibility so important?

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 :->

So the whole issue is really the build tools?

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.

Is Joerg not reading slashdot?

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.

Re:Storm meet teacup

Because most of the thousands of OSS cd tools are merely front-ends to cdrecord.

Re:Storm meet teacup

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.

Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer..

So obvious that you did it yourself, eh?

Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer..

... who got older and dropped the free software principles in exchange for the usual "let's get rich coding something obvious" philosophy.

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.

Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer..

Hear hear.

Re:Go Debian!

Just love to read this. No matter how much he contributed with debian, open source movement, the much needed cdrtools, etc. He watches with simpaty for a moment an open license that is not GPL compatible (for his own reasons, maybe he still have the right of have his own toughts) and became a traitor, someone that must be kicked, expelled and blamed all over internet.

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.

Re:More freedom ?

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.

Re:Not the only controversy

The way cdrecord accesses CD-RW drives in GNU/Linux is different from all other applications. Another one of those "I'll do it my way" ideas by Jörg Schilling.

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.

Re:More freedom ?

The GPL provides restrictions that other free software licenses don't.

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.

Re:More freedom ?

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! :)

Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer..

Have you ever read an email by Mr Schilling? Try this thread [iu.edu] on lkml, and tell me who is being the most annoying. He drags himself through the mud by alienating people with his attitude.

Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer..

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.

Re:Xorg got MIT license- BAN Xorg TOO??????

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 [debian.org]. 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.

Re:Nothing to see here, please move along

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.

Re:cdrtools are nothing without Joerg

Go fuck yourself, Joerg.

Re:Nothing to see here, please move along

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.