Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling(cdrtools) new fork in place

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.

read more
new pkg is mostly will be named cdrkit

to redhatkkaarans:
*www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2006-August/msg00409.html

As it is bound to happen, if he (Jorg Schilling) made it a CDDL one!! Also Jorg released
'cdrtools' under the CDDL license which not compatible with GPL.

M

Forking is bad thing but this was needed, but in the end it's the loss to the community. Let's see further developements now.

It's all very ugly license politics, nothing else. GPLv3 will make matters even worse.

Yamaraj said:
It's all very ugly license politics, nothing else. GPLv3 will make matters even worse.

Why blame GPLv3?
Those big giants which old million+ patents about anything imaginable have already made matters worse. In near future, making new software is going to be a daunting task for people like you and me.

GNUrag said:
Why blame GPLv3?

Because of the new incompatibilities introduced. Not all GPLv2 software can
be relicensed as GPLv3, and this is only the beginning of disputes over licensing,
intellectual property rights and patents.

Unlike most GNU'ers, I don't think business enterprises and their patents are
evil in any manner. If they spend millions and thousands of hours over a new
technology, why do you expect them to give it all up to the community for
free? Why are patents bad?

IMHO, coding as a hobby is different from coding for a living.

Yamaraj said:
Because of the new incompatibilities introduced. Not all GPLv2 software can be relicensed as GPLv3, and this is only the beginning of disputes over licensing, intellectual property rights and patents.

Incompatibilities! Its a new license afterall.. There are additional clauses in GPLv3 with understandably are going to make it incompatible with GPLv2 and authors will have to revaluate their stand. You call it incompatibility, but have atleast have a look at the draft, Its supposed to keep individual developers like you and i safe.. I, for one see the patent retialiation clause in GPLv3 draft as a welcome step. Neither me as an individual, nor my company can afford to pay for code autiting, or patent settlement fees. If GPLv3 does that for me, they why should i complain?? Also note that GPLv3 is mere draft right now and is being actively debated. Incompatible clauses may come and go as of now.

Yamaraj said:
Unlike most GNU'ers, I don't think business enterprises and their patents are evil in any manner. If they spend millions and thousands of hours over a new technology, why do you expect them to give it all up to the community for
free? Why are patents bad?

Simple. Patents kill innovation.

I had attended a talk at IIT sometime back on Patents and Copyright Law. I'll give a small example that speaker gave. Assume IBM has patented the idea of chairs which have three legs. And now you independently come up with a working model of new chairs with 4 legs which are more stable than IBM's mere idea of three legged chairs. Now you spend your entire furtune in either buying 3 legged patents from IBM or paying them compensation when they sue you.

Remember, Science and technology ought to be used for betterment of mankind, and not against it. Moreover, Prof. Eben Moglen himself stated at 4th GPLv3 conference, that patents are nullifiable and he's practically proven by voiding patents of Pfizer's patent on Lipitor, Microsoft's patent of FAT, and his employer Columbia University's patents on certain biotech technology i dont remember. (All three of the organisations, he claims are huge giants in their own fields)

Yamaraj said:
IMHO, coding as a hobby is different from coding for a living.

I dont think so. Coding is coding. You must ensure everynow and then if you are not infringing any particular package's license(in case of working with diverse combination of packages) or if you are not voilating any software powerhouse's patents (in case of working with a totally new revolutionary idea)

In both cases, you have will need to spend a huge fortune in auditing if your program if not voilating any patents.. or in future, you'll need to spend a huge fortune if you get sued for patent infringment.

M

Yamaraj said:
IMHO, coding as a hobby is different from coding for a living.

One day if everything is patented your hobby will be in grave danger. You will have to spend your whole time loooking whether your code violates any patent. So, you cannot really code in your spare time if there are too many patents.

In a capitalist society, businesses and enterprises assign priorities to their
growth and benefit, rather than emotional issues like humanity and poverty.
Patents are here to stay, regardless of the efforts and movements against
them. Patents aren't necessarily bad; but they have been overused and
abused too. I despise patenting life-saving drugs, mouse clicks and gestures
and the likes, though.

Consider an example: company A puts millions and thousands of man-hours
into developing a new technology. How can it let the rival B reap benefits of
its labour for free? A patent will ensure further development and survival of A.
Believe me, I know of many examples like this, when a company rejected
proposal of developing new technology, only because of the fear of its rivals.
Clearly, they couldn't afford to develop something that would have been copied
and forked by dozens.

GNU has become successful because of the free labour it offers. Numerous
young and talented developers have contributed their work without any rewards.
And companies like RedHat, Novell and IBM are making millions for the software
they never developed. What do they developers get?

IMHO, GNU is more about "free labour" than it is about "freedom" and other
gimmicks and buzz-words. Know why more and more Debian developers are
joining Ubuntu these days? Because they get the attention, name and money.

Here's a haiku from me:-

Free, open, libre
All pills, but no choices;
Welcome to the GNUtopia.

Yamaraj said:
In a capitalist society, businesses and enterprises assign priorities to their
growth and benefit, rather than emotional issues like humanity and poverty.
Patents are here to stay, regardless of the efforts and movements against
them. Patents aren't necessarily bad; but they have been overused and
abused too. I despise patenting life-saving drugs, mouse clicks and gestures
and the likes, though.

Businesses apart, GNU has always been a political statement. GNU was always about freedom, and GPL being its freedom manifesto.

Yamaraj said:
GNU has become successful because of the free labour it offers. Numerous
young and talented developers have contributed their work without any rewards.
And companies like RedHat, Novell and IBM are making millions for the software
they never developed. What do they developers get?

FOSS software is mostly developed by individuals to scratch their own itch. And all those developers are already aware of the consequences of releasing their software under a copyleft license. Should we be worried about them?

Besides, RedHat is known to pay several developers whose day job is to commit to linux sources, and Novell to GNOME among others, should we complain about them? Its sad only when there are businesses which pay no regard to community efforts and reap out all the benefits themselves.

In India i remember, PCQuest makes huge money out of selling their own distribution proudly labelled PCQLinux 200X, but has no clue what their responsibilities towards the community are. No wonder, they have Microsoft directors developing a Linux distro

.. Cant be any funnier than this.

Yamaraj said:
IMHO, GNU is more about "free labour" than it is about "freedom" and other
gimmicks and buzz-words. Know why more and more Debian developers are
joining Ubuntu these days? Because they get the attention, name and money.

Yeah, they are joining. But they mere get name. There was huge uproar and cry when few DDs started getting paid for same work. But fact still remains, its mere handful of developers which are on Canonical's payroll. Rest all are doing for community. Besides with Canonical's new efforts to woo IBM, and Oracle.. i dont see it has future as a community distro, the exact reason for which Debian stands for.

debian is forever be a community sustained GNU/Linux distribution and that may be the reason for many to support this distro.but ubuntu is a child distro which is growing bigger than the mother distro showing debian the path to success.atleast debian should make its s/w more uptodate and their releases will be also made soon.