The value of middlemen [LWN.net]

The value of middlemen

Posted Aug 12, 2004 20:27 UTC (Thu) by droberge (subscriber, #10852)
In reply to: The value of middlemen by garloff
Parent article: The value of middlemen

It would appear that the text in the GPL that Mr. Schilling is referring to is:

Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations.

which is the sixth paragraph in the Preamble to the GPL.

It would appear that to some extent SUSE is in fact violating this, but it wouldn't actually be a violation of the GPL since the Preamble isn't actually prescriptive. (IANAL) I am not sure how one could completely comply with this without purging the original author's name from the program which is a clear GPL violation.

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Notification of modification

Posted Aug 12, 2004 20:35 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Don't know about the SUSE version, but Fedora's cdrecord starts by printing a four-line warning that the program has been modified and the original author should not be bothered. Seems like that should suffice.

Notification of modification

Posted Aug 12, 2004 22:39 UTC (Thu) by Soruk (subscriber, #2722) [Link]

The DVD patch I got from Florent (Warly) Villard's CDRtools DVD patch also puts up such a message. I have no problem with this - indeed it makes perfect sense.

Notification of modification

Posted Aug 13, 2004 0:34 UTC (Fri) by droberge (subscriber, #10852) [Link]

The version on my Debian system also displays such a notice; I guess I spoke in haste.

Notification of modification

Posted Aug 13, 2004 6:46 UTC (Fri) by garloff (subscriber, #319) [Link]

On my SUSE Linux 9.1:

garloff@tpkurt:~ [0]$ cdrecord --version cdrecord: Operation not permitted. WARNING: Cannot set RR-scheduler cdrecord: Permission denied. WARNING: Cannot set priority using setpriority(). cdrecord: WARNING: This causes a high risk for buffer underruns. Cdrecord-Clone-dvd 2.01a27 (i686-suse-linux) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling Note: This version is an unofficial (modified) version with DVD support Note: and therefore may have bugs that are not present in the original. Note: Please send bug reports or support requests to http://www.suse.de/feedback Note: The author of cdrecord should not be bothered with problems in this version.

That should be clear enough. And that notice has been put there to avoid conflicts with Mr. Schilling.
But apparently on some old release (on SL82?), there was no such clear warning. He complains about that, despite it's been fixed long since then. I wonder whether that's what really bothers him, though.

Notification of modification

Posted Aug 27, 2004 12:36 UTC (Fri) by sinnerbofh (guest, #24303) [Link]

Same kind of warning in MandrakeLinux 10.0:

$ cdrecord --version

Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a27-dvd (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
Note: This version is an unofficial (modified) version with DVD support
Note: and therefore may have bugs that are not present in the original.
Note: Please send bug reports or support requests to <warly@mandrakesoft.com>.
Note: The author of cdrecord should not be bothered with problems in this version.

Salut,
Sinner