[arch-general] An old, tiresome discussion: cdrtools vs cdrkit

[Joerg Schilling]

Allan McRae wrote:

>Not anything recent: http://lwn.net/Articles/195167/ .  Debian thinks 
>about these things a lot more than we do so I usually would defer to 
>them.  But given they essentially created the cdrkit fork, I'm not sure 
>they are ever going to reassess the situation.

The article you mention contains a lot of dissinformation and I am not conviced 
that Debian did even discuss their actions with a lawyer.

I am happy to answer questions based on informations I have from various lawyers
from Germany and the USA, but please let us ignore the claims from LWN and 
Debian. They are not helpful.


The Sun legal department did check cdrtools in Autumn 2008 and the legal review 
did take three months. The result from this check is that there is absolutely no
legal problem with the original cdrtools software.

Note that Sun is the biggest OSS distributor and thus is a potential target for 
people who like to sue companies for distributing illegal software. Sun thus has
a big interest to avoid anything that might cause legal troubles. Sun for this
reason decided to distribute the original cdrtools and not to distribute the 
fork from Debian.





Jörg

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