On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 03:35:41PM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote: > > * Begin restricted code for quality assurance. > > * > > * Warning: you are not allowed to modify or to remove the > > * Copyright and version printing code below! > > * > > * If you modify cdrecord you need to include additional version > > * printing code that: > > * > > * - Clearly states that the current version is an > > * inofficial (modified) version and thus may have bugs > > * that are not present in the original. > > * > > * - Print your e-mail address and tell people that you > > * will do complete support for this version of > > cdrecord. > > * > > * - Tell the users not to ask the original author for > > * help.
> > I'm not sure at all this is GPL-compatible or DFSG-compliant. Does > > someone already look into that question? > > One thing is sure, it has nothing to do with GPL 2c. This is certainly not DFSG-free: requiring me to provide complete support for a release in order to distribute modified versions isn't free at all. (It's GPL-incompatible, too, but although the cdrecord and dvdrtools source packages contain several GPL components, none of them appear to actually be linked to the problematic code.) I don't know if requiring me to include my email address is DFSG-free. I don't know if these terms are free to the FSF--note that dvdrtools uses GNU Savannah. Requiring that I display a copyright notice and license blurb is OK, but requiring that I not modify the code that does so is not. This even prevents me from fixing the output: "cdrecord -version" displays garbage ISO-8859-1 on my UTF-8 terminal. -- Glenn Maynard
