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

[Heiko Baums]

Am Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:17:01 -0500
schrieb pyther <pyther at pyther.net>:

> 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."

I doubt that someone will go directly to court. If someone sees
licensing issues he most likely will first ask the Arch devs to remove
cdrtools from the repos. If this will be the case, they can just remove
it and revert to cdrkit. This won't cost anything.

If there really was such a legal issue I bet no other distribution
would have cdrtools in its repos or many other distributions would have
been sued already. So why should Arch Linux after many years the first
distro to be sued?

And as I've already written I can't find the CDDL in the cdrtools
source package. I can only find the GPLv2. So cdrecord and mkisofs are
both licensed under the GPLv2.

Greetings,
Heiko