On Friday 25 November 2011 20:03:58 Antonio Olivares wrote: > --- On Fri, 11/25/11, Craig White <craigwh...@azapple.com> wrote: > > ah but it was exactly licensing issues that caused the fork > > of cdrtools into wodim... > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrkit > > http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html > > Counters those claims as well.
From what I gathered after reading some of the discussions between Jorg Schilling and everyone else, the legal status of cdrtools is interpretation- dependent. Specifically, CDDL and GPL may be considered to be or to not be compatible, based on one's point of view, interpretation of the wording of GPL in English versus German language, validity of German laws outside Germany etc. It is not important who's right and who's wrong. The only important thing is that there is no consensus between all parties about the status of cdrtools. And that is what makes cdrtools a no-go package for Fedora, IMHO. The thing is, the status of cdrtools would be completely clear if Schilling had agreed to dual-licence the offending part of the source code. Of course, as an author of that code, he exercised his right not to do it and to keep the CDDL instead. But that gave the impression to everyone else that he is not a good "team player" (so to speak), so many people/devs/distros essentially decided to boycott him and go down the cdrkit route, since cdrkit does not have the licencing issues that cdrtools does. That's how I understand the whole affair. In addition, when the author of cdrtools insists that there are no licence issues, while Red Hat Legal, Debian devs, and basically everyone else insists that there indeed are licence issues, who are you going to believe? > There are several distributions that did keep original cdrtools and have not > incorporated the new wodim. > > Fedora's packagers response here: > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-July/msg00000.html And a great response it is --- clear, to the point, and decisive. :-) Btw, I didn't know Spot was a member of the Legal team. Great work! ;-) Each distro can choose to do whatever they feel is right. As for Fedora, I understand that it strongly upholds the principles of not bundling any code that might have controversial licencing, which is the case for cdrtools. I support this policy, and that's one of the reasons I use Fedora. > I do believe that users have a choice, and if one program does not do the > job, it is our right to install what works for us. Sure, noone disputes that. However, one should never mix one's own freedoms and choices with the freedoms and choices of Fedora. So I don't think it is fair that people bitch about Fedora not including cdrtools. All that said, I actually wonder why cdrkit apparently doesn't work for so many people? It has been several years since it was forked, so I would expect that by now it is pretty much equivalent in functionality to cdrtools. [N.B. I rarely use either myself so I didn't actually compare them...] Best, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
