[e7620]

>> Eventually he fucked up the licensing of cdrtools enough that distros couldn't legally distribute it

Except that most distros DID distributed it UNALTERED, like Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux.

> There was no debate; the developer of cdrtools was just an asshole [...]

Abusing anonymity to vilify an open source developer who works to give us the best software?

You're a liar and a coward, and you know it.

[makomk]

> Except that most distros DID distributed it UNALTERED, like Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux.

Only the ones small enough that they don't worry about getting sued. It's not just Debian developers that think there's a licensing issue that means they can't legally distribute it; the FSF and Red Hat's legal department also agree[1], and I believe even the authors of the CDDL (the GPL-incompatible license he's releasing most of cdrtools under) think that he's wrong.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-July/...

[e7620]

> Only the ones small enough that they don't worry about getting sued

You got it backwards. Precisely only the big commercial distros with mighty legal teams (Debian, RedHat, Fedora) could afford to get away with violating the GPL, and stealing the name of the original project for the fork symlinks. Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.

Here I see powerful entities taking advantage of an individual hacker.

""" During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". """

""" 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 §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. """