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joerg |
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Forking cdrtools as cdrkit |
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-------------------------- |
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So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a |
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joerg |
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lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be |
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joerg |
161 |
taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to |
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joerg |
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better use elsewhere. |
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joerg |
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joerg |
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In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and |
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mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling. He even |
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commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an |
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upstream maintainer can do. Naturally, there were occasionally |
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disagreements, but this is normal. |
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joerg |
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joerg |
173 |
Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL[1] and Jörg Schilling |
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released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license. |
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The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says that this |
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is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and |
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one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico |
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in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was |
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intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- |
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incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have |
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video from that talk available at [2]. |
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joerg |
145 |
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joerg |
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You can read the FSF position about the CDDL at [3]. The thread behind |
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[4] contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more |
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context also see the other mails in that thread. |
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In short - the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not |
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allow. Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly |
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stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial |
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expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally |
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appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the |
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parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically |
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ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL |
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*may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it |
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is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools |
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maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok |
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for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several |
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OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of |
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them. That is and always was our point. |
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joerg |
145 |
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joerg |
161 |
For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code |
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and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by |
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joerg |
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a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of |
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other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge. |
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joerg |
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Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of |
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other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us |
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on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at |
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debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Our svn repository is |
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joerg |
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http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debburn. |
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[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php |
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[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg |
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[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html |
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[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00552.html |
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