Replace one GPL-questionable distro with another GPL-questionable distro ? [LWN.net]

Replace one GPL-questionable distro with another GPL-questionable distro ?

Posted Nov 30, 2006 0:49 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
In reply to: Replace one GPL-questionable distro with another GPL-questionable distro ? by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Who is being divisive?

Fair enough, I see that Fedora's attitude is that the further restrictions can simply be removed by the end users?

If so, it is good to find out that my suspicion that the entire affair was simply being swept under the carpet was unfounded. I wish distributions would state their position about this issue more clearly.

I don't want to install Fedora to check, but does cdrecord spit out the FUD messages on every run, or were they removed, as has been done in cdrkit? We're getting off-topic here anyway...

In the medium term I hope everyone adopts cdrkit, and in the long term, (one of the) libburn(s).

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Replace one GPL-questionable distro with another GPL-questionable distro ?

Posted Nov 30, 2006 1:13 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

IANAL, but we are working on the basis that end users can indeed ignore any restrictions on top of any GPL licensed code. If you are a sole copyright holder of a project, you can introduce a new license that is GPL+restrictions but you cant do that unilaterally to a existing GPL'ed codebase with multiple contributors.

There is a number of patches added to Fedora's cdrecord which fixes the warnings, adds support for DVD etc and informs the user to file reports against the project bugzilla rather than to the original author. The cdrecord issue was discussed in detail in the public Fedora development lists and as part of the recent Free software licensing audit in Fedora as you can see in the bug report.

The Debian guy who initiated the cdrkit fork mailed me about their effort and we had discussed the libbburn based effort which he claimed wasnt very mature and didnt support all the hardware that cdrkit did. See the cdrecord alternatives page for more details.

If there is any Free software license issues in Fedora, feel free to mail the fedora-devel list about that and it would get fixed quickly.