Wodim trouble

[Joerg Schilling]

King InuYasha <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The only thing I can figure out from this conversation is that the CDDL is
> supposed to be incompatible with the GPL. If that's the case, why not simply
> ask the original creator to kindly dual license it?

First, it is definitely wrong that the CDDL was made incompatible with the GPL.
The person who brouhgt this claim into public is a former Sun Employee who was
disappointed that the restrictions in the GPL made the GPL impossible for use
with OpenSolaris.

In fact, the GPL is incompatible to nearly all licenses around and this is 
definitely an intended "feature" from the authors of the GPL.


For our discussion, it is important to know whether a possible _general_ 
incompatibility between two licenses could affect a _special_ situation in a
collective work, so let us have a look at the GPL:

	The GPL forbids to mix GPL and non-GPL within _one_ _single_ work
	and the GPL forbids to create a derived work from a GPLd work
	if the derived work is not put under GPL.

Let us look at the "work" mkisofs. This work is a _pure_ GPLd work. It does
not mix GPL and non-GPL code in a single work. With mkisofs, there is also no 
"derived work" that has to be taken into account. The fact that mkisofs
links against CDDLd libs does not create a derived work but ist only a permitted
collective work.


For a more detailed review, please have a look at this book from Lawrence Rosen:
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf who is an independent lawyer who counsels
the OpenSource initiative. The relevent parts for the mkisofs case are on page 
128.


People wo claim that mkisofs has a problem usually missinterpret GPL section 3, 
the paragraph that is past 3 c): This special exception was introduced because
the GPL precursor did contain an illegal claim that forced distributors of 
binaries from GPLd programs to distribute the source of the GPLd program _plus_
the libc from the Operating System the binary was compiled for. As this is a 
claim that is in conflict with the permissions that have been given with the OS
license, the GPL tried to enforce something that was impossible. In the late 
1980s, the so called OS library exception was added in order to prevent 
distributors of binaries to be forced to do illegal things. This section is 
obviously absolutely not related to any special license compatibility grant. It 
just allows to avoid being forced to ship libc.

The conclusion of all lawyers I did talk to, is that there is no legal problem 
with original source.

Jörg

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