[Fedora-legal-list] Legal CD/DVD/BD writing software for RedHat and Fedora

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Joerg
Schilling<Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> Frank Murphy <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://lists.gpl-violations.org/pipermail/legal/2007-July/001065.html
>>
>> This message is from a lawyer.
>
> You are mistaken: Patent attorneys are not lawyers.

Now you're talking nonsense.  Patent attorneys are most definitely
lawyers.  That's what an attorney *is* (a lawyer)[1].

> The article you quoted in addition does not contain useful or valid legal
> theories. It just quotes a claim written by a laymen.
>
> Please read this:
>
>        http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
>
>
> It gives valid legal theories for all claims and it explains why there is no
> problem.

So far I've read the first 1/3 of the document and everything I've
read disagrees with your position.  The other documents you've
provided to back up your position are written by you and are filled
with the same rants you've posted here about how you personally
dislike the Debian maintainers of cdrkit, how you feel the FSF's
interpretation of *their own license* is bunk, how you dislike that
cdrkit is "missing features" and "contains bugs", and how you really
really want everyone to use cdrtools instead.

Here's my interpretation:

You made a bad call when you decided to relicense your code under a
GPL-incompatible CDDL license.  As a result, receivers of older
versions of your code, which is under the GPL, decided to fork the
code and continue to use the GPL license for their work.  This really
gets under your skin so you embark on a campaign to smear the names of
the people who forked your software, cast doubt on the legality of
their fork (despite *overwhelming* evidence you are mistaken - from
the authors of both licenses), and otherwise "encourage" people to
abandon cdrkit in favor of your own work, cdrtools.

In support of this campaign, you post legal opinion provided by
Lawrence Rosen[2], an attorney at law, former General Counsel for the
Open Software Initiative and an advisor to the Apache Software
Foundation, Python project, and the Free Standards Group[3].
Ironically, his legal opinion (note, he *is* a  lawyer and thus
qualified to give legal advice) disagrees with your position[4].  His
position is that work, when combined with a GPL licensed work, must be
licensed under the GPL.  Since

The opinions of a patent attorney are provided, also disagreeing with
your position, so you claim that patent attorneys are not lawyers, a
claim that flies in the face of reason.

Regardless of your personal opinions, the GPL is very clear that the
Debian maintainers you hold in such low esteem are well within their
rights to fork cdrtools, to refuse include cdrtools in Debian, and are
free to modify and use your original GPL licensed code in their works.

Your personal opinions do not matter.  Nothing illegal is going on.
Your license is not being violated (after all, you chose to originally
use the GPL).  People are free to choose not to use your software.
You may not like this, that's too bad.

You keep changing the playing field to try to justify your position:
the FSF doesn't know what they're talking about and should be ignored,
patent attorneys are not lawyers, etc, etc.  The assumption that
everyone is operating under is that "the CDDL and GPL are incompatible
and works licensed under each cannot be legally linked together."
This assumption is not going to change no matter how much you push
your own views[5].

If you want cdrtools to be used, then you have a choice:  you can
relicense it under the GPL or or other GPL-compatible license, or you
can choose to accept that your software isn't going to be used.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/attorney
[2] http://www.rosenlaw.com/rosen.htm
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Rosen
[4] http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
[5] http://osdir.com/ml/redhat.fedora.advisory-board/2006-08/msg00226.html
(note the author)

-- 
Chris