Fedora - time to blink

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Fri, 11/25/11, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:

> From: Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>
> Subject: Re: Fedora - time to blink
> To: users at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Date: Friday, November 25, 2011, 6:22 PM
> On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 22:58 +0100,
> Frantisek Hanzlik wrote:
> 
> > License restrictions are one thing, but IMO Fedora did
> mistakes in
> > free SW preference too - e.g. in each version of
> Fedora for several
> > recent years I had to replace cripled and unmaintained
> wodim with
> > original cdrtools, because otherwise I won't able burn
> CD/DVD media.
> ----
> ah but it was exactly licensing issues that caused the fork
> of cdrtools
> into wodim...
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrkit
> 
> That said, it might have been more productive to file bugs
> against wodim
> for things that haven't worked for you.
> 
> Craig
> 
> 
> -- 

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html

Counters those claims as well.

The Debian fork violates the GPL and the Urheberrecht
	This is a list of violations in the Debian fork. It does not claim to be complete. The Urheberechtsgesetz will be named UrhG below.

The GPL preamble (see also Urheberrecht §14 below) disallows modifications in case they are suitable to affect the original author's reputation. As Debian installs symlinks with the original program names and as many people still believe that the symlinks with the original program names are the original software, Debian does not follow the GPL.

GPL §2a requires to keep track of any author and change date inside all changed files. This is not done in the fork.

GPL §2c requires modified programs to print Copyright messages as intended by the original author. This is not done in the fork wodim.

GPL §3 requires the complete source to be distributed if there is a binary distribution. The Debian fork tarball does not include everything needed to compile the cdrtools fork (complete source) and Debian does not give a written offer to deliver the missing parts.

UrhG §13 requires redistributors to accept the way the author likes to mark his ownership. Debian removed such marks from the source of the fork against the will of the author and did ignore hints on this fact.

In the book »Die GPL kommentiert und erklärt« Till Jäger (the lawyer from Harald Welte) explains on page 63 why removing these ownership marks is also a clear violation of the GPL.

UrhG §14 forbids modifications that may affect personal interests of the author in the work. Debian introduced such modifications as Debian knowingly introduced bugs that prevent use and changed the behavior in a way that makes the command line syntax non-portable and Debian still makes the work available under the original names. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------

There are several distributions that did keep original cdrtools and have not incorporated the new wodim.

Fedora's packagers response here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-July/msg00000.html

Wodim has been on Fedora for a while, and agreements with scsi calls and device conventions have apparently caused problems between disto maintainers and Joerg the original maintainer of cdrecord/cdrtools.  

I do believe that users have a choice, and if one program does not do the job, it is our right to install what works for us.  

If you install cdrtools from source and fire up k3b, it picks up the original cdrecord and not its replacement.  If you remove the replacement, several programs could be affected like livecd tools and others, so you can keep both and use the one that you need.  This should not be a big problem causing users to ***blink***

Regards,

Antonio