Debian seems to have forked cdrtools

[James Wilkinson]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> Linux Weekly News has a copy of the announcement at:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/198171/
> 
> They forked it because of the license problem.

Well, there were a couple of license problems[1], but it basically came
down to the fact that the maintainer was too difficult to work with.

Gene Heskett wrote:
> Now that its a fact, are the debian folks willing to co-operate with the 
> redhat folks and keep this thing in synch?  Or vice-versa?

Yes, the Debian forker (confusingly, another Jörg) has contacted Fedora
asking for / offering co-operation.
http://lwn.net/Articles/198174/

James.

[1] The longer term one was that Jörg had odd ideas about the GPL. He
added "clarifications" to the distribution of cdrecord ("this code can't
be removed") that were incompatible with the GPL as generally
understood. So cdrecord didn't have a clear, unambiguous license, and
Jörg's interpretation made it non-Free and non-Open Source. See
/usr/share/doc/cdrecord-2.01.01.0.a03/LICENSE for details.

The short term one was that if you need build scripts to build a GPL
program, and you distribute that program, the GPL says you need to
distribute the build scripts under the GPL. Jörg Schilling released his
build scripts under the (incompatible) CDDL, saying they were a separate
work. This was true, but irrelevant -- he was perfectly at liberty to
distribute the build scripts under whatever license he wished, but he
was *not* at liberty to distribute other people's GPLed code with those
build scripts, and no-one else had an explicit license to distribute the
result at all.

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