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Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling

Posted by Hemos on Mon Sep 04, 2006 11:21 AM
from the to-the-curb-baby dept.
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.
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  • I believe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2006, @11:25AM (#16038324)
    They told him to fork off.
    • Re:The copyright is still with Schilling by avenj (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @01:09PM
      • by TekPolitik (147802) on Monday September 04 2006, @07:07PM (#16040654)
        (Last Journal: Wednesday November 17 2004, @01:00AM)

        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.

        [ Parent ]
        • by turbidostato (878842) on Tuesday September 05 2006, @03:29AM (#16042923)
          "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".
          [ Parent ]
    • by Bitsy Boffin (110334) on Monday September 04 2006, @01:19PM (#16038959)
      (http://www.gogo.co.nz/)
      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.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:The copyright is still with Schilling by orasio (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:37PM
    • Re:The copyright is still with Schilling by joelt49 (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @04:01PM
    • Re:The copyright is still with Schilling by drinkypoo (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @04:55PM
    • Re:The copyright is still with Schilling by DragonWriter (Score:2) Friday September 08 2006, @01:46PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Ouch (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2006, @11:26AM (#16038328)
    I understand dropping his package, but kicking him? Man, I don't want to upset the Debian team.
  • I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bombcar (16057) <racbmob&bombcar,com> on Monday September 04 2006, @11:27AM (#16038337)
    (http://www.bombcar.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday January 22 2006, @01:15AM)
    Won't the GPLv3 be incompatible with the GPL?
  • by bgfay (5362) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:30AM (#16038356)
    (http://bgfay.blogspot.com/)
    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.
    • by OmegaBlac (752432) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:53AM (#16038494)
      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.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? by bgfay (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:04PM
        • by HiThere (15173) * <charleshixsn@@@earthlink...net> on Monday September 04 2006, @04:30PM (#16039849)
          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.)
          [ Parent ]
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? by BrokenSegue (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @12:16PM
    • Re:Is the MPL the Mozilla Public License? by Jussi K. Kojootti (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:19PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by Spazmania (174582) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:34AM (#16038383)
    (http://bill.herrin.us/)
    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.
  • 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? by cduffy (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:02PM
      • Re:MPL not allowed in Debian? by Wesley Felter (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:37PM
      • Re:MPL not allowed in Debian? (Score:5, Informative)

        by squiggleslash (241428) on Monday September 04 2006, @12:59PM (#16038853)
        (Last Journal: Friday November 09, @04:36PM)

        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.

        [ Parent ]
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:MPL not allowed in Debian? by WilliamSChips (Score:1) Tuesday September 05 2006, @04:07PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:MPL not allowed in Debian? by Wesley Felter (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @11:50AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrsam (12205) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:35AM (#16038385)
    (http://manpages.courier-mta.org/)
    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 by Wesley Felter (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @11:48AM
      • Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)

        by thrillseeker (518224) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:55AM (#16038503)
        If Sun releases their VM under CDDL, it will still be free software.

        Some pigs are more equal than others.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:CDDL is free (Score:4, Interesting)

        by lhand (30548) on Monday September 04 2006, @12:51PM (#16038815)
        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.
        [ Parent ]
    • Re:CDDL by eviltypeguy (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @11:49AM
      • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)

        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.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ray-auch (454705) on Monday September 04 2006, @01:00PM (#16038861)

          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.
          [ Parent ]
          • Re:CDDL by krmt (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @01:30PM
            • Re:CDDL by ray-auch (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @08:50PM
              • Re:CDDL by JackieBrown (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @09:08PM
          • Re:CDDL by kailoran (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @03:24PM
          • Re:CDDL by MrResistor (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @04:02PM
            • Re:CDDL by XO (Score:2) Tuesday September 05 2006, @12:13AM
              • Re:CDDL by MrResistor (Score:2) Tuesday September 05 2006, @02:22AM
      • Re:CDDL by thrillseeker (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @11:57AM
        • Re:CDDL by WebMink (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:52PM
      • Re:CDDL by Fordiman (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:01PM
      • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)

        by r00t (33219) on Monday September 04 2006, @12:25PM (#16038675)
        (Last Journal: Friday May 05 2006, @11:53PM)
        "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.

        [ Parent ]
        • Re:CDDL by interval1066 (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @12:38PM
          • Re:CDDL by tweek (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @03:10PM
            • Re:CDDL by MrResistor (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @05:40PM
        • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Insightful)

          by belmolis (702863) <.billposer. .at. .alum.mit.edu.> on Monday September 04 2006, @12:38PM (#16038753)
          (http://billposer.org/)

          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.

          [ Parent ]
          • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Informative)

            by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Monday September 04 2006, @01:22PM (#16038974)
            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.
            [ Parent ]
        • Re:CDDL by Corwn of Amber (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @12:45PM
          • Re:CDDL by Nutria (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @01:09PM
            • Re: CDDL by Omniscient Ferret (Score:2) Tuesday September 05 2006, @02:06AM
              • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
        • Re:CDDL by eviltypeguy (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @01:01PM
          • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Informative)

            by r00t (33219) on Monday September 04 2006, @02:35PM (#16039325)
            (Last Journal: Friday May 05 2006, @11:53PM)
            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...
            [ Parent ]
          • Re:CDDL by OmnipotentEntity (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:58PM
            • Re:CDDL by Mr. Underbridge (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @06:11PM
        • Re:CDDL (Score:5, Interesting)

          by rainer_d (115765) on Monday September 04 2006, @03:54PM (#16039697)
          (http://www.i-duffner.de/)
          > 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?)

          [ Parent ]
        • Re:CDDL by Shanep (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @04:52PM
          • yes and no by r00t (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @06:05PM
      • Re:CDDL (Score:4, Funny)

        by harmonica (29841) on Monday September 04 2006, @12:25PM (#16038678)
        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.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:CDDL by Tore S B (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @01:33PM
      • Re:CDDL by James Cape (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @02:37PM
      • Re:CDDL by swillden (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:48PM
      • Re:CDDL by Haeleth (Score:1) Monday September 04 2006, @03:16PM
      • Re:CDDL by mrsam (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @03:19PM
      • Re:CDDL by Jah-Wren Ryel (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @03:41PM
      • Re:CDDL by alienw (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @03:53PM
      • Re:CDDL by Mr.Ned (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @05:08PM
      • Re:CDDL by Mr.Ned (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @05:23PM
      • Re:CDDL by Omniscient Ferret (Score:2) Tuesday September 05 2006, @01:42AM
        • Re:CDDL by Daffy Duck (Score:2) Tuesday September 05 2006, @02:17AM
      • Re:CDDL by jonadab (Score:1) Wednesday September 06 2006, @06:40AM
      • 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:CDDL by A beautiful mind (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:22PM
    • Re:CDDL by Chops (Score:3) Monday September 04 2006, @01:41PM
    • Re:CDDL by evilviper (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @02:16PM
    • Re:CDDL by Rich0 (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:11PM
      • Re:CDDL by rainer_d (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @04:03PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by gladbach (527602) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:38AM (#16038412)
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eviltypeguy (521224) on Monday September 04 2006, @11:39AM (#16038417)
    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 by r00t (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:00PM
    • Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rhizome (115711) on Monday September 04 2006, @12:04PM (#16038565)
      (http://www.synthesizer.org/)
      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.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong by DoofusOfDeath (Score:2) Monday September 04 2006, @12:43PM
    • Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mr.Ned (79679) on Monday September 04 2006, @05:00PM (#16040008)