https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856805 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856805#c8 qvacfcajdjw@mailinator.com M8R-2yr72d@mailinator.com <M8R-2yr72d@mailinator.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status|RESOLVED |REOPENED Resolution|FIXED | --- Comment #8 from qvacfcajdjw@mailinator.com M8R-2yr72d@mailinator.com <M8R-2yr72d@mailinator.com> 2014-02-27 16:28:45 UTC --- Reopening, because there is no publicly available statement on the legal status of cdrtools; and so far you have only commented on the earlier legal threats of Joerg against SUSE, not on the actual GPL-CDDL-Mixing problem that caused the removal ~7 years ago. I'd like to retitle the bug report to:
Document legal situation of cdrtools licensing
Cooperation problems with Mr. Schilling (and the Anti-SUSE messages that existed in cdrtools and on the web site before) is only one of the problems. The other problem (which sparked the issue in the first place) is that the cdrtools licensing was called "unsatisfiable" before. Because there is GPL code and CDDL code involved. (Which is also why source-only Linux distributions were not affected). cdrkit is called "a fork starting from the last distributable version" for a reason, isn't it? http://lwn.net/Articles/195167/ [...] The relicensed bits include cdrecord and libscg. Other components, such as mkisofs and libparanoia, remain under the GPL and LGPL, respectively. Some of these licenses are unlikely to change; the mkisofs code has copyrights held by a number of people (and companies) other than Mr. Schilling, and going back as far as 1986. Since mkisofs, at least, is built with libscg, the resulting system is a combination of GPL and CDDL-licensed code. In the minds of most observers, this combination is not distributable. Even when current SUSE legal (i.e. Ciaran) follows the reasoning of Mr. Schily (which is apparently on the lines of "libscg is part of the operating system, and therefore excempt from GPL as per:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
Either way, SUSE should (because of the huge discussion which has developed from cdrtools over the years) **document** their position in some statement how they interpret the licenses, and why this makes cdrtools distributable in their opinion when all the other distributions seem to disagree. To make it easy for people to decide whether they follow this reasoning, or not. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.