What is the mkisofs license?

[Rahul]

Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Sigh.  I love writing "license mess" articles.
> 
> After reading a bunch of classic Shilling mail on another mailing list,
> I did an "rpm -qi mkisofs" on my rawhide^WFedora development system.
> Here's a few lines of what I got...
> 
>   Name        : mkisofs                      Relocations: (not relocatable)
>   Version     : 2.01.01.0.a10                     Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
>   [...]
>   Size        : 1651183                          License: CDDL
> 
> The interesting thing is that mkisofs is *not* licensed under the CDDL.
> The code has copyrights going back to 1993 (Yggdrasil!), and it is
> clearly a GPL-licensed program.
> 
> According to the source, mkisofs uses libscg, which, in the 2.01.01
> release, *is* licensed under the CDDL.  Which says to me (and a bunch of
> people on the Debian lists) that the resulting combination is not
> distributable. 
> 
> Is this issue on Fedora's radar?  There may be trouble brewing here...
> 

Yes. Last I heard CDDL was not even a acceptable license by itself to 
Fedora.  Thanks for pointing this out. Copying the relevant people.


Rahul