Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling 473
An anonymous reader writes "Debian's cdrecord maintainers announced that they have had enough of Jörg Schilling and kicked his program suite cdrtools out of Debian, introducing a free fork of his no longer free cdrtools." I've put the message below, along with some other links.
So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to better use elsewhere.
In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling. He even commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an upstream maintainer can do. Naturally, there were occasionally disagreements, but this is normal.
Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL and Jörg Schilling released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license. The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. The FSF itself says that this is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL- incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have video from that talk available.
Here is the FSF position about the CDDL. This thread contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more context also see the other mails in that thread. In short -- the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not allow. Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL *may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of them. That is and always was our point.
For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge.
Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Here is our svn repository.
What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
It is also important to note that Danese Cooper's employment with SUN ended in March of 2005 (http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper/). This means that any statements made by her are not officially representative of SUN. Conspiracy theorists are free to believe what they wish.
In addition, what the maintainers have failed to mention is that they have repatedly introduced patches to the codebase that have broken or otherwise caused problems in the cdrtools codebase. They need help because they don't know how to maintain cdrtools properly.
In addition, there are currently problems with Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Notably that the project does not consistently enforce them because many rules are not explicitly written, instead each software is judged on a case-by-case interpretation making it difficult for upstream developers to comply and those interpretations themselves are not always consistent. If you want proof of this, just read the various flame wars on debian-legal, etc.
Just an excuse (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still squabbling I guess (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:CDDL (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's?
You make it sound like Joerg was all hot air, and not a extremely technically cable person.
No, this should not be suprising news to anyone who's been following LKML. You could've predicted this a long time ago. What is really interesting here is the revelation that Sun explicitly made CDDL intentionally incompatible with GPL.
It's only a revelation to those who believe it. Thankfully there are those who know better. Danese Cooper was no longer a SUN employee as of March 2005. Her words (from after that) are therefore not representative of SUN.
Reading this just underscores the fact that you just can't trust Sun, and nobody should hold their breath on account of Java.
Ah yes, let the conspiracy theories begin! The same sad old song. Despite the fact that SUN has released more code than any other company under *free* and *open source* software licenses they're to blame for everything.
It's funny because when the Apache Software Foundation has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, no one gave them grief, but SUN moves to one and suddenly they're evil...
The real problem here is NOT the CDDL, Apache License, etc. The real problem is the GPL. There are many licenses classified as *free software* by the FSF that are incompatible. What makes SUN's any more evil than the other ones? If Richard's (RMS) criteria for what is free software isn't good enough to make all *free software* licenses compatible, then perhaps his criteria is wrong?
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I couldn't find that in the article, is this your personal inside information, did you talk to him or are you just asuming it, as it is so easy to interpret decisions in a way that fulfills your own prejudices.
about time (Score:5, Insightful)
- why scsi emulation was better than native atapi/ide support
- why the dvd patches were unofficial, and dangerous and you should buy his dvd modifications instead.
- his insistance of clearly marking "unofficial" versions with warnings that tell you to use or buy his version
- his sections of code that were not to be modified because he was afraid of answering questions about others instable patches.
- his license change
-
cdrtools is dead. long live cdrkit.
Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)
Some pigs are more equal than others.
Like XFree86? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see a lot of positive things coming out of this move.
Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
(probably Jorg in fact)
Re:Now get rid of the delay... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
What Danese Cooper says is wrong. I and many other members of the OpenSolaris project know for certain that SUN did not create the CDDL to be purposefully incompatible with the GPL.
This does not contradict the stance holding that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL.
In addition, what the maintainers have failed to mention is that they have repatedly introduced patches to the codebase that have broken or otherwise caused problems in the cdrtools codebase.
This has nothing to do with the license.
In addition, there are currently problems with Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Notably that the project does not consistently enforce them because many rules are not explicitly written, instead each software is judged on a case-by-case interpretation making it difficult for upstream developers to comply and those interpretations themselves are not always consistent.
In light of this, it would be an act in the name of consistency to further exclude other CDDL projects. It seems you are arguing for the inconsistency to be applied to cdrtools rather than fighting for greater consistency. A predictable reaction to the situation you describe could be to acknowledge the problems between the CDDL and the GPL and frame the controversy in this way, but when projects with incompatible licenses point to other problems in Debians inclusion choices in order to slip themselves through the gate it just poisons the well further rather than attempting to help satisfy Debian's goals.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? They didn't fork to GPL, they forked the last GPL'd version, because new versions are released under the CDDL which is specifically incompatible with the GPL. And Debian is based on releasing only GPL'd or GPL-compatibly-licensed softwares.
Re:Good for Jorg... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for Jorg to stick to his guns. He can choose whatever license he wants to release his code under.
Of course he is. This freedom extends to releasing code that nobody else can legally use. A CDDL build system+GPL codebase isn't legal for anyone else but Jorg to distribute. More power to him.
Re:CDDL (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't surprise me in light of my experience with some of his other projects. On several occasions I've come upon one of his projects on Freshmeat and been interested enough to try to build it. This has generally been problematic. He has his own configuration and build system. It isn't necessarily bad - it may even have some advantages - but it is idiosyncratic and in my experience a pain to use. When I've examined the specifics of his project I usually find that the differences between it and the more standard version (several of his projects are variants of standard utilities, e.g. his count [freshmeat.net] is a variant of wc) aren't sufficiently interesting to me to make the hassle of his build system worthwhile, or that they lack features of other variants that are important for my purposes. (His count, for example, is said to be faster than GNU wc, but doesn't understand Unicode.)
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
most kernel developers strongly disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we run the SCSI protocol over USB, FireWire, SerialATA, TCP/IP, and numerous other transports. You can't address all the devices on the Internet with a 3-bit number. Devices come and go. If you plug in a CD burner, it usually shouldn't matter which USB port you use.
The Linux solution is UDEV. We can also use D-BUS and HAL. Device names in
Joerg wants to use an obsolete backdoor. He doesn't use the normal device names or the normal CD/DVD driver. He uses the
Suppose you have two USB burners. If you yank out your USB cable and then put it back, the device numbers may change. The device names can remain the same, thanks to UDEV. Joerg's defective program will be unaware of this. It will just use the wrong burner.
Re:CDDL (Score:4, Insightful)
really ? someone needs to tell the FSF then, because they still list all the apache licenses as incompatible http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#
no offence intended, you may be a lawyer etc., but I trust the FSF website on this a lot more than someone posting on
so, until someone credible says otherwise, the GP is right, the Apache Software Foundation does have a license that is incompatible with the GPL. furthermore, since it's been so, and been known to be so, for a number of versions, it is unlikely that this incompatibility is accidental.
on that basis they deserve at least as much grief about it as Sun.
Re:But it belongs to Schilling, does it not? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. You may distribute this software only if you wear a chicken suit
and 2. You may distribute this software only if you do not wear a chicken suit
so Jorg says you cannot distribute the software unless you both do, and do not, at the same time, wear a chicken suit. Fairly obviously, in this universe, distributing software under those conditions would be somewhat impossible.
The deb maintainers have tried to show Jorg this problem, but he is unwilling to change the situation, and as a result the only way that deb can legitimately distribute this software is to fork it from before the second licence was imposed and continue development themselves.
Basically, they've given Jorg every opportunity to correct the problem so he can continue to have his package legally distributed by debian, he's refused for whatever reason, and so debian has NO CHOICE but to fork it, drop it, or distribute it illegally. They chose rightly to fork it.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Xorg got MIT license- BAN Xorg TOO?????? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no problem at all linking GPL software with libraries of either. Same goes with the apache license and perl's artistic license.
Sun's license isn't GPL-friendly, and even if there's a question about it, debian needs to find a way around it. This is the way debian works - it's all in the social contract [debian.org]. It's a pain sometimes, but there's distros out there who don't worry so much about licensing issues you can use if you're concerned.
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CDDL (Score:3, Insightful)
Because as long as Joerg's tool was free software, there was no need to. Nobody really cared much about Joerg being a jackass, as long as his software basically worked, and was redistributable under the GPL.
Until one of those two properties changed, Joerg could've remained as pompous and as much of an ass as he wished. But that will hold true only until you cross a certain line.
We've seen this happen with XFree86. Now, it's cdrecord/dvdtools. I'm sure it'll happen again, in the future.
Re:about time (Score:3, Insightful)
amen to that. goodbye, and good riddance.
congrats to the debian team for maintaining their standards.
Re:Good for Jorg... (Score:3, Insightful)
what? if your project is committed to remaining GPL-compatible and a contributor relicenses code that's fundamentally incompatible with that, what do you expect them to do?
debian did the right thing, in a straight-forward and even gracious way.
Re:What Danese Cooper says is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Danese Cooper is the primary author of the CDDL; if there's anyone who knows the CDDL, it's her.
In the video linked in the article (from May of this year), she does indeed say that the CDDL is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, and the Sun employee also in the discussion (Sun's free software community relations guy) confirms this.
In the video it's explained that the Solaris development community didn't want to release the code under the GPL, and if Sun had done so prominent developers were ready to quit. Also in the video, she explains that Sun modelled the CDDL on the Mozilla Public License intentionally with the hopes that the Mozilla community would adopt it, and that the CDDL was left incompatible with the GPL partially to appeal to the Mozilla community.
Re:I've wondered about Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, arguably the author himself forked when he began to use a new license. He himself created a CDDL fork from the GPL version. This is simply a reversion to the GPL version.
Second of all, the Debian Free Software Guidelines [wikipedia.org] simply do not permit use of the CDDL. More on this at http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ [debian.org].
Short form: If you don't like their politics, don't run their distribution. Case closed.
Re:Jörg Schilling is just another developer.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Any criticism on how eg USB doesn't follow Joergs preferred namingscheme goes unanswered somehow.
I'm only a simple user, but even in my experience the dev=h,b,t,l way to address a burner is flawed. Anyone can reproduce it with 1 usb burner and a couple of usb drives or simply 1 firewire disk (which will simply increase the hostid each time you unplug/plug it (atleast mine does)).
He had some credits for bringing cd recording to Linux, but maybe he should simply abandon Linux and concentrate on his beloved Solaris.