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

[Joerg Schilling]

Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:

> > The common understanding of the laywers in Germany and the USA on what's happening
> > when a program links against a library is that this creates a so called "collective
> > work" which is not a derived work. The GPL definitely allows such collective works.
> >
> > See page 114 ff. in:
> >
> > http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
> >
> > Lawrence Rosen is the legal advisor of the OpenSource Initiative opensource.org.
>
> The FSF interprets that quite differently.
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
>
> 	This is a free software license. It has a copyleft with a scope
> 	that's similar to the one in the Mozilla Public License, which
> 	makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means a module
> 	covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot
> 	legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for
> 	this reason.
>
>
> So the debate as it stands is:
>
> FSF says no

This is not true......

What the FSF says is unfortunately missleading as what the FSF says does 
_only_ apply if you would try to merge GPL code with other code in a 
_single_ "work". As you see, this does not apply to cdrtools. The libraries
mkisofs links against are not just "modules" but own independent "works".
In case you don't know: we did have a long discussion in the late 1980s about
the usability of the GPL (when the GPL precursor appeared with the first GCC) and 
as a result, the GPL was intentionlly modified to allow a GPLd program to link 
against any independent library under any license.

There is a problem with combining _any_ GPL incompatible license with GPL
code into a single work. This is e.g. true for GPLv3, as the GPLv3 is 
incompatible to the GPL and for this reason, you cannot combine GPL code with
GPLv3 code.

If the FSF was unbiased, they needed to urge people not to use GPLv3, do they?
Does the FSF list the GPLv3 as a GPL incompatible license?

Just a hint: the FSF accepted a "collective work" created by Veritas by adding
closed source libraries with GNU tar. Veritas was never sued for creating this
collective work.....

The FSF does not own any code in cdrtools and the FSF does not publish 
cdrtools, so it is obvious that the FSF is irrelevant for your discussion.

Jörg

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