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The unending story of cdrtoolsThe unending story of cdrtoolsPosted Aug 13, 2009 3:46 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)Parent article: The unending story of cdrtools
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.
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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.
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