"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <b...@iguanasuicide.net> wrote: > On Wednesday 2009 January 07 10:23:52 Joerg Schilling wrote: > > Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > > The problem with wodim is that it is not a real fork. > > A fork is something that is supported, > > Not true. "In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers > take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent > development on it, creating a distinct piece of software." --
The people behind wodim did not start an independent development. All they did was to take an old source, remove the pefectly working build system, replace it by something that is broken and add some other bugs to the source. After 8 months of speudo activity, wodim is dead since May 6th 2007. > > but wodim is unsupported. > > Also not true. Debian supports all the software shipped in main, and > provides > best-effort support to software shipped in contrib and non-free. In > addition, wodim's upstream is still very much alive. See above, there is no support. Bugs reports are either marked as closed altough the bug still exist or they are ignored. This is not what I would call "mainteied". Wodim is dead since May 6th 2007. > > Wodim is in conflict with both GPL and Urheberrecht (*). > > > > *) http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/index.html > > > > Wodim (cdrkit) cannot be legally distributed > > I disagree and I don't think either of us can point to established precedent. > > I also don't think there has been any legal analysis (meaning: done by a > lawyer as legal advice) done on the particulars. Well, I did discuss the problems with a German specialized lawyer who is also active on the OSS community and it turns out that I am of course able to sue the people behind wodim for more than violation. On the other side, there is no professional that supports the claims/FUD by the "wodim people" against me. All those claims are done by laymen and these people did not even give evidence for their claims. > Wodim identifies itself in both documentation and at runtime as a separate > work form cdrecord. That's all that is required to satisfy the GPL. I can't > speak to satisfying the Urheberrecht, as I do not speak the original > language. The GPL gives you the right to use the code if you follow the conditions. The GPL does not give you the right to use the original name for a fork. The people behind wodim do not follow the conditions of the GPL and they do not follow the conditions in the higher worthy Urbebertrechts law. Whether the name is used directly or via a symlink does not matter. The original names are used without permission and in addition, there are other Copyright violations. > > Cdrtools (the original) had 55 releases in the last 100 months. > > All labeled "alpha", not "stable". I was very clear that I was only counting > stable releases. All those releases are more stable than any of the wodim releases, so what? > > >Wodim certainly had and has it's share of issues, but so has cdrecord. If > > > > This is a funny claim. Please tell me about a single problem with cdrecord. > > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?archive=both;package=cdrecord > > Anything with a bug number < 350738 is or was a problem with cdrecord. Wrong: none of those reports applies to the original cdrtools source code as Debian has a 4-5 year history of distributing broken modified versions. Even if a single bug report _could_ have applied to cdrtools at the time it was made, the bug has been fixed years ago in thge original but is still present in wodim. I asked you to name me a single bug in the original cdrtools and you seem to be unable to point to such a problem - thank you! > > I am not sure about your intention here. If you care about legallity, you > > cannot use wodim, so what is your point? > > I disagree. I personally have no doubt that wodim is legal. I personally do > doubt that distributing binaries of cdrecord is legal. I know that wodim is not legal and my laywer supports this. As mentioned above, there is more than one way to sue the people behind wodim because there is more than one violation in wodim. > > The original software is of course free software. It seems that you are in > > doubt because you listen to the wrong people ;-) > > Other than you, I couldn't name anyone I listen to. Instead I listen to the > argument, independent of the person making it. Your arguments seem to be on > more tenuous foundation, and counter-intuitive. That said, some legal > decision on the matter could demonstrate effectively that I am quite wrong. ???? You sound confused. > Both the authors of the CDDL and the GPL have said these licenses are > incompatible, making it impossible to satisfy both at once. According the > the most plain interpretation of both documents, that would be necessary for > someone other than the original author to distribute binaries of cdrecord. > Software that can't be distributed in binary form by someone other than the > author is not free software. Thus, I believe cdrecord to be not free > software. You are again wrong here..... The authors of the CDDL do definitely not claim that there is an incompatibility. You are again listening to the wrong people. In contrary to your claims, on my request the Sun lawyers did do a very intensive legal review of the cdrtools project this Summer and did not find any problem. In fact, the current license situation is present since May 2006 and noone did try to sue Sun, Gentoo or Slackware for distributing the original cdrtools. Noone at Debian is able to sue people because they do not own the needed rights on the software. Claiming that Debian could be sued for distributin the original software is obviously pure FUD. Cdrtools _is_ free software and it of course follows the rules in http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php and http://www.debian.org/social_contract The problem is that some people inside Debian missinterpret http://www.debian.org/social_contract and in special try to establish different rules for cdrtools and the rest of the debian packages. If debian would use the same "rules" for all software, either all packets including cdrtools are legal or nealy none of the debian packages could be called legal. Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org