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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Joerg Schilling
<Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> 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.

This may be a huge stumbling block for all involved. We've all dealt
with bureaucracy before and usually when something is not viewable by
the public like this, while we're all told to "take our word for it",
warning signs are raised. "Just trust us" will never work coming from
some faceless corporate entity.

Getting this actual legal review made public would be a huge step not
only in trust, but also in closing this issue once and for all.

Might I ask WHY this review isn't made public?