On Wednesday 01 Sep 2004 21:26, Paul wrote:
Based on the assumptio that Jorg is the copyright holder on cdrecord, then he is within his rights to restrict the use of the package name.
Hm, that would presumably mean Open Source authors can effectively stop people distributing their software, unless they call it something else. MS could buy up the Apache Foundation and stop distros including 'apache' packages. Seems a bit counter the the spirit of free software. Aren't names covered by trademarks rather than copyright? IANAL obviously...
Of course it might be preferable if Suse either provided a package that worked better or forked it properly so Joerg didn't get the flak. But I find it hard to believe they're doing anything illegal by distributing a patched version, even though it might arguably be a bit disrespectful towards the author.
The open source community usually manages to work these kinds of problems out reasonably amicably and productively. Joerg's managed to get himself a bit of a reputation for intransigence though. I would be too surprised if cdrecord went the way of xfree86 at some point.
Isn't it called cdrtools now anyway?