On Jul 19, 2008, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > The GPL then violates #9 in the definition >> > 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software >> It doesn't, really. It applies to a program, and to other works >> derived from the program. It doesn't apply to works that are >> merely aggregated in the same distribution medium, without forming >> a single program under copyright law. > Then how could the fork of cdrecords had to be created if it was not > Restrict Other Software? AFAICT the issue has nothing to do with other software, but rather about software under incompatible licenses being part of the same program. Now, I don't have all the details, but it appears to me that, if it's all code whose copyright is held solely by Jörg Schilling (I don't know that he is), he's legally entitled to license each piece under whatever licenses he likes, and he won't be infringing anyone's copyrights, because he holds all copyrights involved. Now, anyone else who'd like to modify or distribute the programs and libraries in the package he releases would have to comply with the licensing conditions he chose for each entire program. As it turns out, it appears that the conditions are contradictory: while they grant permissions for the individual components, some of the programs in there, taken as a whole (i.e., containing code under GPL and code under CDDL, including code from libraries the program contains), could only be distributed in violation of both licenses, so it couldn't be legally distributed. I can see why Debian (and anyone else) would object to distributing code under these conditions :-) Now, IANAL and I haven't looked into the details, I draw my conclusions from the links you posted. Anyhow, even if this is not the exact situation, it appears that there may have been another component to the decision to fork. Other issues than licensing are clearly visible in the discussion threads about the original package and GNU/Linux distributions. This alone might have been enough to justify a fork, and the licensing change may have very well been just the event that got the trigger pulled. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
