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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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lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be
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taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to
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better use elsewhere.
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In the past, we (the Debian maintainers) had a good and mutually
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cooperative relationship with Jörg. He even commented on Debian bug
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reports, which is one of the best things an upstream maintainer can do.
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Naturally, there were occasionally disagreements, but this is normal.
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Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL[1], a license that was
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intentionally made to be incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says
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that this is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One
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current and one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference
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in Mexico 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
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GPL-incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we
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have videos from that talk available at [2].
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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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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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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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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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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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