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Diffstat (limited to 'FORK')
| -rw-r--r-- | FORK | 63 |
1 files changed, 63 insertions, 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +Forking cdrtools as cdrkit +-------------------------- + + +So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a +lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be +taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to +better use elsewhere. + +In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and +mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling. He even +commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an +upstream maintainer can do. Naturally, there were occasionally +disagreements, but this is normal. + + +Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL[1] and Jörg Schilling +released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license. +The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says that this +is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and +one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico +in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was +intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- +incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have +video from that talk available at [2]. + +You can read the FSF position about the CDDL at [3]. The thread behind +[4] contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more +context also see the other mails in that thread. +In short - the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not +allow. Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly +stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial +expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally +appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the +parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically +ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL +*may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it +is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools +maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok +for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several +OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of +them. That is and always was our point. + + +For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code +from Cdrtools [5] and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It +is now replaced by a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute +should be free of other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current +knowledge. + + +Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of +other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us +on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at +debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Our svn repository is +http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debburn. + + +[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php +[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg +[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html +[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00552.html +[5] Cdrtools 2.01.01a08 from May 2006, http://cdrecord.berlios.de |