On Wednesday 01 September 2004 1:56 am, MJ Ray wrote:
SuSE's hacking caused cdrecord author Schilly to turn it undistributable, allegedly: http://lists.debian.org/cdwrite/2004/08/msg00112.html and also "Thread Next". Now the saga has its own clothes: http://www.cafepress.com/mjg59.13063296 and http://www.cafepress.com/mjg59.13089491
Roll on apps moving to libburn: http://icculus.org/burn/
Thank you for pointing me to this, the thread you mention is pretty much required reading for anybody interested in making software available through the GPL Generally (for those who haven't got time to digest the whole thread) the gist is this
SuSE made several changes to cdrecord to allow two things (DVD burning and the ability to run without being suid root)
Jorg the original author dislikes these changes and doesn't want people complaining about his software being broken if it is SuSE's mods causing the issue.
SuSE have added a discalaimer saying that Jorg should not be contacted regarding issues with cdrecord as they have applied many changes. However Jorg's problem is that people don't read this disclaimer and contact him anyway.
Essentially the gist of Jorg's statement is that changes within the terms of the GPL are only good if they (in his opinion) somehow improve the software, and that anything else is essentially deformation of character as his name ends up on a faulty (in his opinion) binary (despite it being next to several lines clearly stating that someone else has messed with it)
Seems a bit unreasonable to me I must say. I was disappointed with the attitude that came across from his website. Sometimes I find myself working with Linux on pretty cutting edge hardware and often things don't work as expected. If I can't resolve these issues myself I think it's the only decent thing to do to at least inform the author(s) (and possibly work with them to make things good) I
However Jorg will not even discuss these issues unless you send him a sample burner. Also there are comments like this on the front page
"Both RedHat and SuSE publish bastardized and defective variants of cdrtools in their distributions. If you have problems on RedHat or SuSE systems, first fetch a recent original cdrtools source, compile it yourself and run the original instead of broken software that illegally claims to be cdrecord."
That claim of illegality is very intersting and not the way I interpret the GPL.