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

[Joerg Schilling]

Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:

> It would be nice if you updated your homepage (which would need a new
> look too, it reminds me of the old days when using the internet was
> annoying due to those ugly blinking websites). Quote from
> http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html#legal:
>
> "There is no license problem in the original cdrtools
> 	Sun lawyers made a full legal review on the cdrtools package between
> August and November 2008 and did not find any license problem.
>
> The claims from Eduard Bloch obviously conflict with the GPL license
> text. See the GPL legal review from Lawrence Rosen an independent lawyer
> who worked for the OpenSource initiative.
>
> Read more about the background in a few days."
>
> I would love to read more about this background. Unfortunately the "in a
> few days" has been there for at least a year.

Well, the background is that Eben Moglen confirmed that there is no problem
with the original code but then did not give permission to publish his review 
results.


> However, the real question here is: Even if there is a license problem,
> will the original mkisofs copyright holders sue anyone over it? I pretty
> much doubt that.

The original author (Eric Youngdale) started mkisofs in October 1993.
The last version he did make himself was published in December 1996,
at this time, the code was ~ 7000 lines of code.

In the time between early 1997 and Autumn 1999, most of the maintenance
work was done by me and a recent mkisofs from me was already part of the 
cdrtools source tree. In Autumn 1999, Eric did finally tell me that he has no
longer time and interest in maintaining mkisofs and handed all development
material over to me.

The current mkisofs source is ~ 29000 lines of code.

> I don't pretend to understand any of this license crap anyway - it is
> supposed to be free software, but it is making itself un-free due to
> these braindead license discussions.

I did not start that braindead discussion, I am also just a victim.

Jörg

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