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When Sun Microsystems set down to create a license for the release of Solaris and other code, the end result was the Common Development and Distribution License or CDDL. Most people who have looked hard at the license have agreed that it is, indeed, a free software license. It is also, however, considered to be incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL); the Free Software Foundation has this to say about the CDDL:
This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. It requires that all attribution notices be maintained, while the GPL only requires certain types of notices. Also, it terminates in retaliation for certain aggressive uses of patents. So, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
This license incompatibility has, among other things, put a roadblock in the way of incorporating any Solaris code into the Linux kernel (and vice versa). The two remain in their own separate licensing universes, and cannot mix.
Not everybody appears to share this opinion, however. Consider Debian bug 377109, filed by the sharp-eyed license watchers in that camp. It seems that Jörg Shilling, the maintainer of cdrtools (containing cdrecord, mkisofs, and other tools), decided to license his build system for those tools under the CDDL. The GPL requires that build tools and scripts also be released under the GPL, so mixing the CDDL build system with the GPL-licensed CD/DVD tools made the whole thing undistributable - at least, in the eyes of the Debian developers.
Since that bug was filed, the situation has evolved somewhat. The current 2.01.01 cdrtools release has relicensed a number of code components under the CDDL. 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.
The Debian developers are now trying to figure out what to do about this situation. As most people familiar with the relevant personalities would likely expect, conversations with Mr. Schilling have not come to any sort of productive outcome - though it has yielded an amusing nine-point plan from Mr. Schilling on how to fix Debian's cdrecord problems. A very possible outcome is that Debian will drop Mr. Schilling's cdrtools distribution and maintain a fork starting from the last distributable version; other distributors may well follow suit. The dvdrtools project has been pointed out as a possible starting point.
Forking cdrtools is not a particularly new idea. This package has been the subject of a long series of inflammatory disputes with its maintainer, who does not always agree with the Linux way of doing things. People have often wondered in public just why this version of cdrtools was still in use. The answer, presumably, lies in the fact that (1) cdrecord works for most people, who can happily ignore its maintainer, and (2) CD/DVD recording is a complex and tricky business which intimidates many developers who might otherwise jump into the code. Whatever the reasons might be, no cdrtools fork has gotten very far.
The licensing issue might just be the final straw that makes a viable fork happen. Distributors can ignore a difficult maintainer, but it is harder for them to ignore possible licensing issues. If they decide that cdrtools cannot be distributed in it current form, they will have no alternative to ceasing distribution - and that means coming up with a replacement. This may be the year when, finally, cdrtools for Linux finds a new maintainer.
So,as of now major distros are using wodim aka cdrkit .
what wodim actually are doing these days?are they copying the codes from cdrtools?(like firefox and iceweasel )
latest wodim date is 17-Mar-2008 21:47 1.4M ,which means development is actually done
share ur views and updates
Last edited by deepclutch; 03-31-2008 at 12:35 PM..
interesting post, i just last week started to look at the burning progs in linux, and the cdrtools package, but im a noob and i dont really understand it.
at the moment, my distro still ships with cdrtools, so untill such time that the maintainer decides otherwise, im sticking with that.
do you know whether the fork of cdrecord uses the same options/switches?
do you know whether the fork of cdrecord uses the same options/switches?
Yes. This has been my experience, but FYI it's also mentioned in the web page:
Quote:
Derived from the various programs distributed in the cdrtools suite, cdrkit aims to maintain interface compatibility with those tools. The cdrecord program has been renamed to wodim ("write optical disk media") so that users will not confuse it with the original cdrecord, which is still maintained by its author, Jörg Schilling. wodim, and the other programs distributed with cdrkit, will retain a user interface compatible with the corresponding programs from the cdrtools 2.01.01a08 release, at least for the near future. Thus, front-end programs, such as GUI-based CD writer applications, should be able to use cdrkit merely by substituting the name "wodim" for the name "cdrecord".
the main reason I started the thread is,coz of the "BAD" words from the original author Schilling.
see his page :
Quote:
Linux controversy
In autumn 2005 and early spring 2006, a group of Debian maintainers started to attack the cdrtools project.
The attacks have been based on the fact that cdrtools was licensed under the GPL. As a result, on May 15th 2006 most projects from the cdrtools project bundle have been relicensed under CDDL (giving more freedom to users than the GPL does). At the same time, an important amount of additional code (DVD support code from Jörg Schilling and a Reed Solomon decoder from Heiko Eißfeldt) has been added to the freely published sources.
In summer 2006, the attacks from the group of Debian maintainers escalated and in September 2006, these people created something they call a fork from cdrtools. They soon added a lot of bugs and this way turned the "fork" into a questionable experiment. The last work on this "fork" has been done eight months later on May 6th 2007, then the leader of the attacks stopped his efforts.
Although there is no "project" activity on the "fork" anymore since more than 9 months (which is more than the speudo activity period), there are still people who spread incorrect claims on both the original project and the fork. Please help the free original project by correcting these incorrect claims.
Strange license claims from some Debian maintainers
This is what the group of Debian maintainers used to attack the cdrtools project:
They claimed that the GPL requires the build system (used to compile GPL software) to be included and to be published under GPL if binaries from the compiled GPL sources are published.
They then took old cdrtools sources and replaced the original build system by something that is not under GPL (nor under a GPL compatible license) either. They even omit parts of the build system they use (although GPL �3 is very explicit about this).
Now you only need to become crazy to understand why they believe the Debian fork is "free" but the original cdrtools is not.
Many Linux distributions now come with broken variants of cdrtools
I completely disagrees to his POV reg Debian's decision(Debian was right!).
But..as the author of cdrecord and other tools,he asserts that the wodim and other fork are buggy! :evil:
What do we say?Is there any devel who can really answer this?
I completely disagrees to his POV reg Debian's decision(Debian was right!).
But..as the author of cdrecord and other tools,he asserts that the wodim and other fork are buggy! :evil:
What do we say?Is there any devel who can really answer this?
It's been a long time since I heard about this, but IIRC the Debian people were aware of certain bugs which affected the code base they forked from. The decision to fork was an informed decision, and they weighed advantages and disadvantages. That said, if you look at the changelog for wodim in unstable, you'll see it's definitely receiving maintenance.
Cdrecord started to suck badly when you suddenly had to get a license key to burn dvd's (of course this never worked for me).
After that stunt I am confident I wont be checking out schillix either.
Aside from the licensing issues, the author of cdrtools has a valid point that the cdrkit fork has introduced show-stopping bugs. for example, note the variety of posts out there from ubuntu 8.04 users who can't figure out why cd burning has suddenly stopped working after upgrading. myself included.
There was a huge debate going every which way before the fork.Basically what it boiled down to was that cdrecord was relicensed with the CDDL and that wont fly with GPL distros.
Personally I wish it did because then we would have zfs.
Now if you'd like to find out why it was relicensed just do a google search and enjoy the flamefest on various mailing lists.
Aside from the licensing issues, the author of cdrtools has a valid point that the cdrkit fork has introduced show-stopping bugs. for example, note the variety of posts out there from ubuntu 8.04 users who can't figure out why cd burning has suddenly stopped working after upgrading. myself included.
Could you share a link to the bug report for this?
I'm interested in it, even though I haven't had any problems burning CDs or DVDs with 8.04.
PS: By "upgrading" you are referring to, like, as opposed to having done a clean install, right?
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cdrkit vs cdrtools what is latest?
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