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The unending story of cdrtools
Certain unwelcome stories seem to never really go away. One may think that
an issue has been resolved, only to be attacked by a zombie version years
later. It has been almost exactly three years since LWN last wrote about license problems with
cdrtools; the combination of GPL- and CDDL-licensed code in that
package rendered the whole undistributable. Linux distributors responded
by switching to cdrkit - a fork of cdrtools taken from a release prior to
the problematic license changes - and it seemed like the problem was
solved in an optimal way. The community had eliminated a licensing problem with an important
package and disconnected from a difficult upstream maintainer at the same
time.
But these problems are never solved, it seems. In June, Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrtools, wandered into the fedora-legal list with a request for Fedora to resume shipping the "original, legal" cdrtools software. After a discussion of the type that typically follows Jörg around, Tom "spot" Callaway stepped in with a definitive response (short version: "no") which pretty much brought the discussion to an end. Life got quiet again until early July, when Luis Medinas suggested that openSUSE might want to switch back to cdrtools. That was Jörg's cue to make one of his predictable appearances, inspiring an even longer and stronger version of the kind of discussion that tends to follow him around. This time Jörg made a direct lawsuit threat against SUSE, but showed his forgiving side too:
Anyway, if you are showing good will with fixing the current
problem by starting to distribute the legal original software
again, I may give you some time to recover from the mistake of
switching to the illegal fork.
One might well wonder about the reversal of roles here; now it's Jörg who is complaining about the legality of cdrkit. His complaints have been posted to the web. They include the fact that the "wodim" CD recorder packaged in cdrkit is installed as "cdrecord" (a GPL violation, he says), the lack of detailed change information within the source files, the failure to print a copyright notice "as intended by the original author," an (unspecified) failure to distribute "complete" source, and a couple of alleged violations of German copyright law (which, it seems, forbids any change which Jörg disapproves of). All told, it is a long series of complaints resulting from a simple fork of a GPL-licensed program. Most observers do not take these claims seriously. The complaint about the cdrecord binary is (somehow) based on the preamble of the GPL - which is not part of the binding terms. Section 2a of the GPL does require dated notifications of changes, but it's a rare project which carries those notifications within the source files themselves, as Jörg is demanding. The complaint about copyright notices is interesting. Cdrecord has traditionally been a verbose utility, and that verbosity has extended to Jörg's thoughts about Linux distributors and kernel developers. For example, version 2.01.01a01 (from 2004) would print things like:
Warning: Running on Linux-2.6
There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer.
If you have unexpected problems, please try Linux-2.4 or Solaris.
SuSE Linux is known to ship bastardized and defective versions of cdrecord.
SuSE is unwilling to cooperate with the authors.
If you like to have a working version of cdrtools, get the
original source from ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/
(The current version, 2.01.01a63, has lost some of that language). The removal of some of that verbosity is what he is complaining about. But GPL section 2c only requires the printing of "an appropriate copyright notice" (not any specific notice), and it only applies to programs which read commands interactively, which wodim does not do. So this claim, like the others, has failed to create widespread worry. In short, many in the community seem to see Jörg as a sort of comic figure, but that should not be allowed to obscure an important fact: there are some points worth noting behind his complaints. These include:
The first issue needs to be taken seriously; it is never a good idea to distribute code with problematic or disputed licensing. The fix here is relatively straightforward: stop distributing that code if the license cannot be verified, and, possibly, reimplement it (as Sun is said to have done with libcdio). The second may be harder. The freedom to fork a package out from under an uncooperative maintainer is one of the fundamental features of free software. But forking is expensive; it only works if somebody else does the work which has been pulled away from that maintainer. An unmaintained fork is just more dead code. If cdrkit reaches a point where it fails to work for users, distributors will be left with an unpalatable choice: continue to ship unmaintained code, or go back to the original, with its difficult maintainer and incompatible licensing. It would be much nicer to find somebody willing to put some time into this important tool. CD recording is a detailed and tricky task, but we have plenty of people in our community with the necessary skills to work in that area. (Log in to post comments)
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 3:46 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
I don't know about a "comic" figure. If anything, I see Mr. Schilling as more tragic: obviously a talented programmer, who cares about his work, but crippled by an immense ego and inability to work with others. The fact that he also has less than no understanding of the legal issues surrounding his work* only exacerbates matters.
More than anything, though, I see him as a massive waste of time. Not worth talking to, not worth listening to, not worth engaging in any fashion.
* If information is positive, and misinformation is negative, then it is indeed possible to have less than zero knowledge. Which is where we find Mr. Schilling's legal understanding.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 5:04 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Schilling is obviously clueless about what the GPL implies. Given the number of Linux programmers now employed by several companies, one would think writing a complete replacement for cdrtools, free of Schilling's code, would be within the realm of possibility. (Soren Schmidt's "burncd" from FreeBSD could be a starting point, though it is admittedly much more limited than cdrtools).
On the other hand, it is now many months since I wanted to burn a CD, and with USB media becoming more and more common for both data and music distribution, I suspect the importance of cdrtools is going to decrease. For a long time a huge limitation of linux (and other open-source operating systems) was the inability to use a CD-RW as a floppy, using the UDF filesystem in read-write mode. But nobody seems to do that anymore. Memory sticks are more compact, faster and have larger capacity. So all of this may become irrelevant soon...
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 5:58 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
It does DVD:s also Posted Aug 13, 2009 7:33 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] suspect the importance of cdrtools is going to decrease.I also rarely burn a CD, but I frequently burn DVD:s, usually with wodim from cdrkit. It works perfectly, so I'm not sure having the development of the cdrkit fork stalled is any big deal: it is a solved problem as far as CDs and DVDs go. New media like Blu-Ray might of course need changes, I don't know what is the state of Blu-Ray burning on Linux, as I have no such hardware yet (but might well have in a year or two when the cost becomes reasonable).
It does DVD:s also Posted Aug 13, 2009 8:48 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
We provide CDs to our customers rather than USB media. They cost less.
Furthermore, booting from a CD works just about anywhere and is pretty easy to explain. Booting from a USB media works quite differently in every BIOS.
Oh, and I use wodim and never had a problem.
There are a lot of kinks in CD recording Posted Aug 13, 2009 8:02 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]
Mainly caused by multiple vendor implementations and a large variety of media types. Although cdrkit has trundled along I'm not surprised it's not getting the attention of other more sexy projects. The work is generally boring and requires having a large number of different vendors hardware to test well.
Having said all that and as others have pointed out I can't actually recall the last time I needed to burn a CD. I certainly have two very dusty spindles of CDs and DVDs in my office.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 8:18 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
Is Schilling crippled by an inability to work with others, or is it only those others who wish to work with him who find themselves at a disadvantage? I mean, sure, if he's absolutely desperate to work with other people but his social antiskills get in the way, then that's a disability (and fair enough; I've got a letter from a psychologist which says I have one of those myself). But if he really couldn't care less about it, then - not so much?
> More than anything, though, I see him as a massive waste of time. Not worth talking to, not worth listening to, not worth engaging in any fashion.
That necessarily has to include "not using any of his stuff", though. Which is great, if working alternatives exist...
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 16:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
He really doesn't strike me as being absolutely desperate to work with
other people. That would involve compromise, occasionally changing your mind, and understanding that other people can sometimes improve on your ideas or even have ideas of their own, three things that Joerg appears entirely incapable of understanding.
I agree with flewellyn: the man's quite a pitiable figure, really.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 21:50 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
> He really doesn't strike me as being absolutely desperate to work with
other people.
I was going off in a "in that case, isn't he rejecting the very value system by which you're judging him?" direction, but it suddenly occurred to me that I don't actually agree with you here. Not that I think he wants to work with other people, necessarily, but he certainly wants to be *acclaimed* by other people. Otherwise he wouldn't have released cdrtools in the first place, and he wouldn't work so desperately hard at self-justification. Being right is vitally important to him, it appears - unfortunately, so much so that he apparently can't admit to being wrong... or maybe it's more that he can, but his persuasion threshold is just a loooong way above most people's? After all, most of us will only admit that we're wrong once we've persuaded ourselves of it - even if someone else has sat down and walked us through our mistake, we won't admit to being wrong until we see the mistake ourselves. That's a good thing. It becomes somewhat less good when we can out-argue the person trying to show us our mistake, at least to the point where persuading ourselves that we don't have to listen to that person is easier than persuading ourselves that we've actually screwed up. Indeed, it's probably harder for an amazingly bright person to avoid that particular beartrap.
Er, am I making sense...?
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 21, 2009 7:10 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Absolutely, I concur completely. Kudos and the need to be seen as 'in the
right' is without a doubt the primary reason cdrtools got released at all. Everything points that way: the tetchy explosions when someone releases or even *uses* a competing product, the kibozing for the names of competitors and the product itself, the prominence given to Joerg's name in the always-displayed part of everything he's ever written... Joerg wants respect, which is perfectly understandable: unfortunately he goes about getting it in a way that can only destroy it.
The poor sod.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 8:28 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]
You missed out on Jörg's bullying of developers when I closed the nautilus-cd-burner bugs as
obsolete. Thinks like this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509508#c3 Or this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377100#c7
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 14:20 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Please always inform bugmaster@gnome.org when people are unproductive on GNOME Bugzilla. I've banned the account.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 27, 2009 12:38 UTC (Thu) by asdlfiui788b (guest, #58839) [Link]
Let's see what happened....
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509508#c3
was appreciated by others.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377100#c7
as well as the comment before are both comments made by
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377100#c10
is an attack against the author who was helpful.
So it seems that a person with admin privileges for the
We all know that there are always people who don't like
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 8:56 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] He's unforunately right about "violations of German copyright law (which, it seems, forbids any change which Jörg disapproves of)". This is because many European countries provide what are known as "Moral rights". You can read that Wikipedia page for all the details, but I know it's a particular problem for free software in France (if you distribute it there and any of the authors come from France). Moral rights include the right of the author to control the "integrity of the work". They are also not transferable. The author continues to control the moral rights even if they were done as work-for-hire or the copyright was transferred/sold to another party. Yet another sillyness about copyright law ... Rich.
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 9:03 UTC (Thu) by liw (subscriber, #6379) [Link]
While moral rights do exist in European copyright law (and that is good), if an author releases the work under the GPL, they explicitly give permission to do almost any kind of change to the work, including changes the original author disapproves of.
So I don't buy that argument.
I admit I haven't studied German law. If that really supports the claim, then the GPL is effectively dead in Germany.
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 9:24 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] if an author releases the work under the GPL, they explicitly give permission to do almost any kind of change to the work, including changes the original author disapproves of.As far as I know, under Hungarian law the author is actually not allowed to give up/sell/transfer/etc. his moral rights. I guess its similar in German law. I don't know how this relates to the GPL, though.
Moral rights - no problem, AFAICT Posted Aug 13, 2009 10:06 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
My understanding of moral rights is also that you can't give them up. That's their point. It's to put limits on how much a powerful publishing house can bully an individual author.
But, that doesn't mean that Jorg is right or that moral rights are a problem for free software. Moral rights are interpreted by a judge, and no judge has yet ruled that a software developer has moral rights about the technical direction of a project.
Further, if moral rights are a problem for free software, they they're also just as much a problem for proprietary software. Example: I work for CompanyX, I write some software, I leave, the subsequent maintainer makes changes, I wail about my masterpiece having been ruined and I take CompanyX to court over violation of my moral rights. That's never happened, so there's nothing to substantiate worries about moral rights in software.
Moral rights - no problem, AFAICT Posted Aug 13, 2009 13:57 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
I seem to recall (although I don't have the details) that there was a court decision in Germany which clarified the situation with moral rights and free software, basically stating that releasing your code under a free software licence was already a clear statement of how you wished your work to be used.
Moral rights - no problem, AFAICT Posted Aug 13, 2009 18:57 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] If anyone has a link, that would be very interesting.
Moral rights - no problem, AFAICT Posted Aug 13, 2009 21:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I vaguely recall seeing the argument made that the (sometimes ignored) GPL requirementa) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.is intended in part to address the moral rights issue: if my changes to your program break it, it should be made clear that you are not to blame. I think that this was in some interminable debian-legal discussion where someone claimed that the above requirement curtails freedom somehow.
Moral rights Posted Aug 14, 2009 16:47 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] My understanding of moral rights is also that you can't give them up. That's their point. It's to put limits on how much a powerful publishing house can bully an individual author. What kind of bullying do you think the law contemplates? Kidnapping the author's child? Offering the author so much money he can't refuse? Blacklisting the author with other publishers so he can't work? Or maybe the point is just to protect an author from his own ignorance or foolishness.
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 10:19 UTC (Thu) by mp (subscriber, #5615) [Link]
Checking the Polish copyright law: computer programs have some specific rules applied to them. This includes limiting the applicable moral rights to only being considered the author of a work and being able to publish it under your name, pseudonymously or anonymously. Control over integrity and uses of the work is specifically excluded for computer programs here.
No idea if such limitations are present in the law of other countries, but I would think this cannot be only a local idea.
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 9:59 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]
I know for a fact you can't transfer or give up moral rights in France. One project I'm involved with (based in France) took legal advice about this issue, and it means the project can only take very minor patches from outside contributors into the base package. The reason is that some outside contributor could later claim their moral rights over parts of the project, if, for example, we pissed them off or had to substantially change their contribution later. There is no disclaimer or FSF-style assignment we could do that would change this situation.
[However note IANAL, and IANA European (C) Lawyer either]
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 19:37 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
However, on the issue of moral rights, I don't quite buy this argument since the moral rights are intangible in every sense but being mentioned as the/an author -- the important rights are the right to use, distribute, copy, etc. ("Verwertungsrechte" in German), and those are easily transferable, transfered, etc. I suppose that's what the other comment about licensing under GPL alluded to.
Moral rights Posted Aug 13, 2009 21:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
So, er, how do you become a non-outside contributor? Join the right INRIA
research group? It seems to me that unless there's a way to become 'not outside', they've eliminated any possibility of getting new development blood into the project, which cannot be good :/
(yes, this is a guess as to which project you're talking about, but I bet
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 9:54 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Section 2a of the GPL does require dated notifications of changes, but it's a rare project which carries those notifications within the source files themselves, as Jörg is demanding.
Well the point of is that the source files carry notice of who screwed around last with the source it is, IMO, a logical step in ensuring that the original author does not get the blame for bugs.
>The removal of some of that verbosity is what he is complaining about[...] But GPL section 2c only requires the printing of "an appropriate copyright notice" [...]
Since 2.01.01a62 does not have the Linux is completely fucked wording anymore (thank you), it cannot be what he is complaining about. On the other hand, I verified that wodim-1.1.7.1 does not print the copyright messages anymore (`cdrecord/wodim -atip`), and the GPL section *1* requires keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty, and GPL section 2c does not change that factIMO.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 19:10 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty Note that there's no requirement (in GPLv2-section 1, where that quote comes from) to preserve the functionality of displaying these notices. Commenting out that code would certainly be fine, as would leaving that code there but deleting the code that displays those notices (except in the circumstances mentioned later in the licence, but for now we're just talking about section 1). So the only thing left to look into is whether the cdkit maintainer completely deleted those notices (rather than commenting them or deleting the display code), and whether *that* is a licence violation. Easily repairable, and the maintainer probably wouldn't object to re-adding those lines (commented out) to comply with the licence.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 14, 2009 16:56 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't think the code in question is a notice, though, whether it's commented out or not. The code is just a mechanism that generates a notice when it is run. Copyright notices are text aimed at a human reader who might be considering copying the code, such as what is probably at the top of Jorg's source files. As long as cdrkit leaves those intact, I don't see any failure to meet conditions of GPL.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 17, 2009 20:26 UTC (Mon) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> Well the point of is that the source files carry notice of who screwed
> around last with the source — it is, IMO, a logical step in ensuring > that the original author does not get the blame for bugs.
Does it necessarily need to be in the source code? Isn't a public version
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 18, 2009 9:30 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
But that information would be lost on git-archive and similar.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 19, 2009 0:28 UTC (Wed) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Many projects auto-generate their ChangeLog file before creating archives of releases -- that ought to do nicely.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 18, 2009 13:49 UTC (Tue) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]
> Since 2.01.01a62 does not have the Linux is completely fucked wording anymore (thank you), it cannot be what he is complaining about.
There never was any such message.... Cdrtools treats all 30
If a platform makes incompatible interface changes that
For the last major interface incompatibility that was introduced
BTW: I cannot comment the article itself as this is hidden from the public :-(
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 18, 2009 17:04 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Unrelated to cdr* itself, could you perhaps provide an updated e-mail addresses on the cdrtools page? I tried the two listed on there, but both bounced last time I tried (01/2009).
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 19, 2009 14:40 UTC (Wed) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]
> could you perhaps provide an updated e-mail addresses on the cdrtools page?
I updated all mailing list related entries on the cdrtools web page at:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/cdrecord.html
hope this helps.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 13, 2009 23:48 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Google hosted an interesting talk upon how Open Source projects can deal with poisonous people. Of course Jorg considers himself, it seems, the not so benevolent dictator for life of his own project. And also, in his own way, is sort of the "ricin" of poisonous people. But the video is still interesting:
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 18, 2009 16:14 UTC (Tue) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]
> Google hosted an interesting talk upon how Open Source projects can deal with poisonous people.
Thank you for the pointer to video of the talk.
After watching it, it seems that I did everything correctly
The GPL could possibly be revoked retroactively Posted Aug 15, 2009 0:32 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
There is a bigger problem. Under some legal interpretations, a GPL license can be retroactively revoked. So, if that is true, Joerg could conceivably simply do that.
I have posted about this in more details, with links to the legal opinions here, in my journal here : http://slashdot.org/~cecom/journal
I don't know if it is true - IANAL. It has never been done. I also know that the FSF claims that the GPL is non-revocable. However what I have read on the subject is at least some food for thought.
Don't believe what you hear so easily. Posted Aug 15, 2009 6:30 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] The fellow's argument wasn't very convincing in the context of British law, which he's writing for. It certainly isn't convincing in the context of US law where we do have a case (the first appeal in Jacobsen v. Katzer) finding that there is legal compensation involved in Open Source licenses even if it isn't money. And there's a case in Germany.There's something you have to realize about lawyers. Every time there's a trial, the lawyers on both sides will argue their sides. Not the right side, both sides. That's what they are trained to do. This fellow is arguing a very very long-shot side for the sake of some unnamed client or just because he doesn't like the GPL (which is true for many lawyers). When you see a judge allow someone to withdraw the GPL, you can take him seriously. Until then, no.
Don't believe what you hear so easily. Posted Aug 15, 2009 20:34 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
Well, I certainly hope that you are right. But what about this opinion from David McGowan, Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School.
-----
[...] The most plausible assumption is that a developer who releases code under the GPL may terminate GPL rights, probably at will.
[...] My point is not that termination is a great risk, it is that it is not recognized as a risk even though it is probably relevant to commercial end-users, accustomed to having contractual rights they can enforce themselves.
The Free Software Foundations GPL FAQ disagrees with the conclusion I reach here. The FAQ asks rhetorically can a developer of a program who distributed it under the GPL later license it to another party for exclusive use and answers No, because the public already has the right to use the program under the GPL, and this right cannot be withdrawn. 89 Similarly, Lawrence Rosen, general counsel to the Open Source Initiative, has stated (in an FAQ on the SCO/IBM case) that Linux is available free, forever. Neither statement addresses the issue I raise here; I am not aware of the legal basis for either statement. I read them as understandable efforts to keep community members from over-reacting to low-probability risks. That may be sensible real-world pragmatism, a question I leave to the entrepreneurs. As a strictly legal matter, however, these comforting statements are too strong.[...]
What would happen if an author terminated GPL rights? If a single rights-holder held all the rights in the program, then termination would stop future F/OSS development of that program; users would no longer have the right to distribute modified versions of the code, or even unmodified copies of the versions they had."
--end quote--
This guy is a professor in US law, and it is not immediately clear that he "hates" the GPL or has a reason to spread FUD.
Also in this link http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35258?cur... Eben Moglen himself all but confirms the same thing:
-----
So, I don't think it is very clear cut. There is at least a somewhat plausible interpretation that the GPL is revocable.
Don't believe what you hear so easily. Posted Aug 16, 2009 3:21 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] The Volokh and Moglen comments don't apply any longer because the appeal in Jacobsen v. Katzer established a precedent. They were speaking before that happened. By the way, I think the quote you are concerned with is of Volokh, not Moglen.I'd like to see this tried. A person gets a license that claims to be irrevocable and has a reasonable expectation that it is. An assign of the copyright holder then claims that the license the copyright holder conveyed doesn't apply due to the assign's arbitrary decision. Good luck with that :-)
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 18, 2009 14:50 UTC (Tue) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]
> Certain unwelcome stories seem to never really go away. One may think that an issue has been resolved, only to be attacked by a zombie version years later. It has been almost exactly three years since LWN last wrote about license problems with cdrtools; the combination of GPL- and CDDL-licensed code in that package rendered the whole undistributable.
This was a very unfortunate article as it did only give attention
The original software however did introduce dozens of bugfixes and
The problem started with a non-cooperative downstream packaging
As a _reaction_ to his slander, I changed the license from GPL to
I am working on OpenSource software since more than 25 years and I
Please do not use the words "the community" when talking about the
Please also note: I did check very carefully the results of a license
The fork however introduced changes that are in conflict with the
But anyway, this fork id dead since a long time and neither
> But these problems are never solved, it seems. In June, Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrtools, wandered into the fedora-legal list with a request for Fedora to resume shipping the "original, legal" cdrtools software. After a discussion of the type that typically follows Jörg around, Tom "spot" Callaway stepped in with a definitive response (short version: "no") which pretty much brought the discussion to an end.
I contacted Mr. Callaway first in a private mail in March and
As you see, the problem in case of cdrtools is Linux distributors
The problem is also people who believe that the GPL gives them
As explained above, the problem was initiated by a non-cooperative
I support OSS and I will continue to do _anything_ possible in order
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 8:41 UTC (Thu) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
The problem I have with convincing myself that you are genuinely trying to help Open Source along is that I'm pretty certain that I've never seen a positive comment about people's criticism of your work. That seems... strange to me. Either *everybody* in the world is wrong, or you are. One seems more likely than the other. Just a glance at the main cdrtools webpage is usually enough to confirm this - full of dire warnings in bold red text, attacks on other people/distributions, etc. I don't *want* to read that (except possibly on a Legal Disputes page or similar), I just want to use a great piece of software.
I was going to quote the relevant bits that you've posted on this thread and show you what I mean about the "only ever talking negatively about criticism levelled at you" but it actually made this comment too big. My point is: Not once have I seen you say... "I understand people's concerns, but..." or "I think X may have a valid point" or "Okay, let's try to meet in the middle" or something similar. It always seems to be *their* fault for not understanding you. With one or two people involved, I could see that, but I've only ever read negative comments from yourself.
From my point of view as a user... I want someone writing the software that actually understands people's opinions/concerns and tries to work with them. Otherwise it is, effectively, unmaintained. You can add all the fancy features you want, but if I think that tomorrow the downloads might disappear because you have *another* dispute with someone, I can't rely on that software - or that you might switch off feature X, or provide horribly unnecessary large warnings in the utitity's output, etc.
You are producing a piece of software and giving it away for free. The reason you do this, I assume, is to benefit your users (or else, why would you do it?). For that, we are grateful, but the benefit seems to stop heavily at that point - you make something useful and then stop it being distributed, create legal concerns where there are none (your understanding of *international* copyright law appears flawed) and stop additions that actually make it better for the user. Individual patches, sure, you can reject, but the ideas *behind* the patch are often greatly needed (the whole /dev/devicename debacle from years back, for example... did we ever resolve that one because it's at that point that I lost interest in cdrtools).
Personally, the whole "personality" of cdrtools makes me avoid it now and I don't want to have to do that. I rarely have to interact with the software on the command-line anyway but out of principle, I remove it from the distribution of my choice and use alternatives. Not because it eases my use of the computer (the exact opposite) but because I disagree with propogating the personality that appears indefinitely attached to cdrtools.
You have a great tool. You can obviously code really well. But the fact that you can't see *anyone* else's point of view, including distributions, users, lawyers, etc. mean that you've shut the code off into its own little political area of unmaintained code (you still patch for it, but nobody cares because people don't want to use your licensing / patches, etc.). I'm just a user, looking for a great Open Source utility to bung some data on a CD occasionally, not some marvellously complicated commercial project. I want a nice command-line interface to do so, I don't want to have to think or deal with legal issues (that's why I prefer GPL licensing - it takes care of that side for me), I don't want my distribution to have to patch and fight with the maintainer, and I want a maintainer that will fix bugs and add features that I (and many others) need.
I don't remove *any* other software from my setup... only cdrtools. That speaks volumes to me. Maybe it should start speaking volumes to you. When an OS project forks, it means that the people who use the fork have different needs... needs that aren't being met by the original software. I hope that in continuing to write Open Source software you recognise the #1 driver behind the entire movement - let the user do want they need to do.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 16:22 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] > /dev/devicename debacle from years backI really don't care about the rest of this mess (although it makes amusing reading sometimes), but it was really irritating that cdrtools' cdrecord bitched at me (or worse, didn't work) if I used the device's normal name (e.g. /dev/cdrom), and instead wanted me to use a cdrecord-specific name ("0,0,0" or something). I'm just glad that misfeature was fixed in the fork, and I hope that if people ever switch back to cdrtools from cdrkit, they make sure that that irritation gets patched out again if it's still present.
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 20, 2009 23:06 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]
--In all fairness, I try to look past the personal disputes and look at the code and the benefits that it provides. For a long time, Joerg was pretty much the ONLY guy doing work on *nix-compatible CD burning software, and he was active with various HW manufacturers testing their drives for compatibility.
--I've only corresponded with him once over email, but he got back to me pretty promptly and answered my question. I gotta respect the guy for what he's done for the community by providing cdrecord, and hope this all gets resolved for him some day.
--Thanks for cdrecord, star, etc Joerg :-)
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 30, 2009 21:26 UTC (Sun) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]
Thank you "wolfrider" for mentioning important facts.
There is still not a single OSS CD writing software for Linux
If you like to fork OSS software, you need to have the right
I do not let my projects become orphaned. I give continuous support
The interesting question is: "Why do major Linux distributors
It would be interesting to see a related cover story on lwn soon..
The unending story of cdrtools Posted Aug 25, 2009 11:11 UTC (Tue) by asdlfiui788b (guest, #58839) [Link]
Quote:
"I don't want my distribution to have to patch and fight with the maintainer, and I want a maintainer that will fix bugs and add features that I (and many others) need."
And given your mentioning of open-source software you probably want it free. And be able to give orders what to do and not to do to the creator?
Well if that does not sound like your average commercially maintained software. Maybe you should try their offers and be relieved of the stress opensource software imposes on you.
Let us take Microsoft:
Or you could take a different cd-burning utility out of the multitude of offers. Hm. Wait, all the others are less good? What a pity!
And what makes you so sure Mr. Schilling does not have access to qualified lawyers to counsel him on this matter? Maybe he could be right with his opinion on the GPL after all?
Cheers...
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