Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling 473
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.
I believe (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The copyright is still with Schilling (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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".
Re:The copyright is still with Schilling (Score:5, Informative)
Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
I don't really see the point. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't really see the point. (Score:4, Informative)
I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How do you release a license as a product?
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
DFSG+GPL/CDDL incompatibilities. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? They didn't fork to GPL, they forked the last GPL'd version, because new versions are released under the CDDL which is specifically incompatible with the GPL. And Debian is based on releasing only GPL'd or GPL-compatibly-licensed softwares.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
cdrtools should have been forked years ago purely based on the technical issues. If you try to run it on a modern system it bleats that you should "upgrade" to Solaris or Linux 2.4!
Maybe now Joerg will admit that the Linux port of cdrecord is unmaintained and he will finally drop it. I wish.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
See MPL [wikipedia.org] for more details.
I wonder why Schilling doesn't just dual-license? (I did RFTA)
Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's clearly untrue, as the FSF explicitly state that public domain code, (modified-)BSD-licensed code, X11-licensed code, and code released under various other licenses that can be combined with proprietary code is GPL-compatible.
This is why, and nothing more.
Still squabbling I guess (Score:2)
Re:Still squabbling I guess (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still squabbling I guess (Score:5, Informative)
Joerg is violating the GPL too (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem for Joerg: he has included GPL work from other people. This puts Joerg in violation of the GPL.
MPL not allowed in Debian? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)
Some pigs are more equal than others.
Re:CDDL is free (Score:4, Interesting)
There are free licenses that are not compatible with the GPL.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)
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#
no offence intended, you may be a lawyer etc., but I trust the FSF website on this a lot more than someone posting on
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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If she spoke about a decision she is knowledgeable of that was made prior to her departure then her words are indeed applicable.
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
his right to make that decision (Score:3)
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.
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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?)
it looks like you didn't install everything (Score:3, Informative)
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/ 4/en/os/i386/SRPMS/sg3_utils-1.06-3.src.rpm [redhat.com]
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 use
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yup.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/k3b [debian.org]
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because as long as Joerg's tool was free software, there was no need to. Nobody really cared much about Joerg being a jackass, as long as his software basically worked, and was redistributable under the GPL.
Until one of those two properties changed, Joerg could've remained as pompous and as much of an ass as he wished. But that will hold true only until you cross a certain line.
We've seen this happen with XFree
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Informative)
--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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Seconded. I used to use Schilling's "prodvd" fork of cdrecord to burn DVDs at work. Since prodvd is shareware (free for personal use, but registration required for commercial use), I talked to my boss about registering my copy, and then tried to contact Schilling to pay him the money to get a legal license. I tried two email addresses listed in his webspace, got no res
anything to do with matt garrett quiting? (Score:2)
What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about dvdrtools? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not really a similar situation at all. Joerg was SELLING dvdrecord-pro, as a commercial app, with no open source equivalent. To get free DVD-burning, there was little choice but to take cdrecord/mkisofs and extend it to DVDs.
dvdrtools was branched off a while ago, and the most recent changes have not been merged from cdrtools.
Last I checked, dvdrtools wasn't as good as cdrtools in specific cases, like burning from bin/cue files.
dvdrtools is very similar, but isn't a 100% compatible, drop-in replacement for users, and applications that use it, as this debian fork is meant to be.
Besides, this fork may just be a short-term measure, which seems likely, as they are planning on integrating it immediately.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
K3B explictly added support for dvdrtools. Try an old version of K3B, before dvdrtools was released, and see how that works out. You can't expect all other applications to be rewritten in a short period of time.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Given that the Wikipedia article begins with the warning "There are very few or no other articles that link to this one", I doubt he's the only one who hasn't read it. Did somebody throw that up there just for this Slashdot discussion?
(Note to the humor impaired - that last sentence is intended as a joke)
Just an excuse (Score:2, Insightful)
GPL incompatable now means not free? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GPL incompatable now means not free? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
XV (Score:2)
about time (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
amen to that. goodbye, and good riddance.
congrats to the debian team for maintaining their standards.
Now get rid of the delay... (Score:2)
But it belongs to Schilling, does it not? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Like XFree86? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see a lot of positive things coming out of this move.
Joerg's position (Score:4, Interesting)
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
most kernel developers strongly disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Good riddance! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Gentoo is starting to really piss me off. (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
ROTFL (Score:3, Funny)
Oh my. That is perfect.
Re:Storm meet teacup (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the front end is NOT linked (and invokes the tool via something like system()) then it doesn't matter what license the tool is written under - a GPL front end can still use it and be GPL, just as you can write non-GPL software that works on Linux.
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:2)
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:4, Funny)
If you continue to experience problems then it is recommended that you upgrade to Solaris or Linux 2.4.
Re:Good for Jorg... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
what? if your project is committed to remaining GPL-compatible and a contributor relicenses code that's fundamentally incompatible with that, what do you expect them to do?
debian did the right thing, in a straight-forward and even gracious way.
Re:Go Debian! (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Xorg got MIT license- BAN Xorg TOO?????? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It wasn't just the license (Score:4, Informative)