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

[pyther]

On 01/27/2010 04:31 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
> Joerg,
>
> The only thing that will definitely change our minds with regards to 
> this is actually seeing a copy of the report saying the linking 
> performed with cdrtools is not an issue due to license restrictions. 
> Until that time, this discussion is going nowhere and makes you appear 
> trollish with your replies.
>
> Maybe we will move to GNU mkisofs/isofsmk as development appears to 
> have started there  (I can troll too...).
>
> Allan
Joerg,

What is in this for you? By that, I mean, why are you fighting so hard 
to get this pushed into the official repos? It is in aur with 130 votes 
and likely there are hundreds more users. 
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=323

There is one thing with Arch that I think you are missing. The arch devs 
do what they want. They include software only that they use/want to 
maintain. In the past they have included software in which licensing 
wasn't quite clear. As it has been stated many times none of the devs 
are lawyers. These software programs were a much lower risk to include 
compared to cdrtools. Said programs did not have the arguments and 
possible legal issues that cdrtools is currently faced with.

Granted if a suite was to be brought against arch, specifically the dev 
hosting it and the owner of the project (Aaron), they would likely be 
asked to remove it. I find this risk relatively low and I'd give +1 to 
add it to the repos (from a users prospective).

Look at the high-profile case of cdrtools vs cdrkit, though; it is huge. 
You stated that sun spent 3 months looking into it. If for some odd 
reason someone decide to sue the arch project there is a big risk for 
Aaron and the maintainer of the package. At the very least they would 
likely have to consult a lawyer and possibly show up in court. This 
becomes a big time commitment and financial burden as the donations from 
this project are fairly minimal (at least compared to the hiring of a 
lawyer).

Lets face it, everyone on this project is unpaid and has a real life. It 
seems as if a few of the main devs have decided they don't want to take 
the "risk."

Why don't you create a repo with cdrtools for arch? It isn't hard to do. 
That way anyone who wants to use cdrtools would have an easy way to 
obtain updates, etc...

pyther