The unending story of cdrtools

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.