cdrtools - a tale of two licenses [LWN.net]

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 12, 2006 20:30 UTC (Sat) by Zomb (subscriber, #23391)
Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Actually the libburn project has been kinda revived. Development of a fork started few days/weeks ago, see http://libburn.pykix.org/wiki/WikiStart for details.

Another fork was maintained by the author of cdrskin in the last months. Currently cdrskin can already emulate many of cdrecord's functions and most of its command line interface.

We can expect both efforts to become merged RSN and be a viable alternative to cdrtools in near future.

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cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 9:22 UTC (Sun) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Good to hear that libburn is still alive in some fashion.

I recall the conversations that spawned libburn, which focused on creating GUI CD-burning tools. The choice came down between (a) wrapping cdrecord and hoping that input/output of the program never changed in ways the wrapper couldn't handle gracefully, (b) modifying the rather complex cdrecord code into being a library, or (c) doing things from scratch.

I advocated very heavily towards either option that made a real library that wouldn't be subject to cdrecord changing and causing either non-functional or dangerously dysfunctional tools. Turned out cdrecord was too ugly to modify into a library for most people, so libburn was born.

I was pretty sad that it never really got anywhere.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 19:17 UTC (Sun) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

Too bad that libburn is GPL and not LGPL. Using GPL for a system library virtually guarantees more stupid license incompatibilities in the future.

Although I suppose if libburn uses some cdrtools code, GPL was the only choice.

cdrtools alternatives sought. (cdrdao anyone?)

Posted Aug 17, 2006 9:41 UTC (Thu) by bjornen (guest, #38874) [Link]

I feel the need to mention http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/ here...

Q: What features of cdrecord is not present in cdrdao?

cdrtools alternatives sought. (cdrdao anyone?)

Posted Aug 17, 2006 11:10 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

You can't do cdrdao image.iso

cdrdao seems to fundamentally designed around the idea that you put files on a CD. That's fine except when what you have is a CD image and that's what you want to put on the CD. It works fine for me for putting files on CDs, but I rarely do that - I usually put isos on CDs and for that I still have to use cdrecord. Somebody fix this omission and I could certianly use dvdtools and cdrdao and get rid of schilly's tiresome (but effective) software.