[arch-general] Burning From Command Line

[Joerg Schilling]

C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me> wrote:

> in the spirit of open licenses, mildly incompatible or not, include
> the best tool for the job = cdrtools.
>
> on a final note, Jeorg, it would be extremely beneficial if you could
> cite a hard resource regarding the legalities involved here, as you
> seem to have a resource. or maybe just dual license cdrtools (why
> not?).  why was the license changed to CDDL exclusive anyways?  i've

As mentioned many times before and as you can read on the website....

The GPL is full of claims that cannot be enforced in court, see: 
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf

This was written by Lawrence Rosen, the legal advisor of the OpenSource 
initiative (Opensource.org) in 2004, but I did know this already in 2001 when 
I tried to be the first person on earth to fight _for_ the GPL and against GPL
violations in court. It tourned out that this is impossible. Note that Harald 
Welte definitely does not base his court cases on the GPL but on the German
legal vehicle "preliminary injunction" where he forbids to sell produced 
hardware that needs to be payed to the producer (e.g. in China) but cannot 
create revenues from selling, based on the preliminary injunction.

Any similar case that would solely be based on software would get lost
unless the objector has an incapable lawyer.

As mentioned before, in 2001 Moglen first spread wrong claims in the public
while I was underway suing two GPL violating companies. So Moglen is already
known as an unreliable legal sources since a long time before Debian started to 
attack cdrtools.

>From the lesson I learned in 2001 from suing GPL violaters, I learned that
it is useless to use a license that tries to enforce many non-helpful 
restrictions on the software. As a result, the main contributors of the cdrtools
project did discuss this and decided to switch to a more liberal license in 
the near future. We just could not fully agree on the BSD license.

Then in December 2004, Sun and I created the CDDL which turned out to be
a license that just tries to enforce as many restrictions as can enforced in 
court and thus seems to be the right compromise between BSD and GPL.

As Debian stedted to attack cdrtools in May 2004 and as Debian massively 
boosted these attacks in late 2005 (including wrong claims about legal 
problems), I decided to switch towads the CDDL on May 15th 2006.
As you see, the license change was a _result_ of the attacks from Debian but 
definitely not the cause.

> been in lengthy license discussion over on Phoronix, and i must admit,
> the more i get into software as a living [6+ yrs now], the less i like
> the GPLv* (notice nobody moves TO the GPL, they only move AWAY...
> this, CouchDB [apache], etc... GPL is too purist IMO)

I personally know some projects that did go back from GPLv3 because the GPLv3
claims more restrictions than the GPLv2 and you are correct, I personally don't 
know about a project that moved from another license towards the GPL.

Jörg

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