[as a personal note, I think I'm really hating that -ctte is turning into -legal over this... :/] On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 11:00:16PM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote: > > The hard one is definitely cdrecord, which seems to be largely Joerg's work. > > While it is purportedly released under the GPL, he seems to have no qualms > > about threatening to sue people that he disagrees with, and if there are no > > other copyright holders on cdrecord we don't have the safeguard of knowing > > he's exposing himself to legal liability if he interferes with our exercise > > of GPL-granted rights. > It was released under GPL. He may change that for the future, and if we > fork he may also make license statements that we arent allowed to merge > code from him into our fork, but he cant really stop us from forking it, > if we follow GPL. > He can try, of course, but I dont think we would lose that battle. AFAIK, the question "can the GPL permissions on a work be withdrawn?" is an unsettled one, and the answer may vary by jurisdiction. In the general case, we are saved from having to argue this question by the fact that most GPL works have multiple copyright holders, so no copyright holder can withdraw or change the license without himself infringing someone else's copyright. So it's clear that he has neither the legal nor moral authority to stop us from forking mkisofs, but for cdrecord neither is clear. Even if we could win a legal challenge over cdrecord, I'm not sure we would be in the right morally. > > As far as not being able to fully replace cdrtools, though, freedom is not > > always convenient; and we have promised that Debian will remain free. If we > > have to excise his code from Debian, it's pretty clear that it will be a > > while before CD burning is again as convenient as it is today, but I don't > > see that it's avoidable if the copyright holder is not acting in good faith > > towards distributions he takes a personal dislike to. > Well. He did like Debian the most of the distributions until recently > (where that Bug came up), as we did only very minimal changes to his > code. Seems like one of the last patches, which changed libscg a bit, > made him also angry a bit, but overall it was ok. Heh, which if anything just goes to show how little room we have for disagreement with this upstream... -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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