Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Friday 04 August 2006 02:40 pm, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > The current problem with Debian is that they disregard their ethics rules
> > and act with arbitrariness. Some people dislike anything but the GPL and
> > apply pressure on authors that use different licenses.
>
> There could be something lost in the translation between you and them
> possibly, I don't know what the problem is. I've always found them to be
> fairly reasonable. I'm not sure what the problem with CDDL is.
I am sure that there is nothing lost in the translation.
In former times, Debian indeed has been very reasonable, but this changed
in the past 2 years. The problem is that they started disregarding their own
rules and started with arbitraryness. What they currently do could be called
calumniation. They started a campaign against CDDL programs last autumn.
There have been two independent offenses:
- In February 2005, I converted star from GPL to CDDL. Debian upgrades
their
star to the new version under CDDL. Later when Nexenta came out, they
stopped upgrading star and in January 2006, someone claimed that "the
aceptance of the CDDL is undecided".
I did tell them that the CDDL is a OSI aproved license and that Debian
uses the same rules as OSI and that they should tell me why they have
a problem with the CDDL. I never received any information about their
problems that was related to the Debian social contract but a lot of
arbitraryness.
- In May 2005, I did release a new cdrtools version that uses a new
"Schily Makefilesystem" licensed under GPL. Debian did upgrade to that
version of cdrtools. Later when Nexenta came out, they stopped
upgrading cdrtools and in January 2006, someone claimed that I was
violating the GPL because I did not publish the "scripts to compile"
under GPL.
I told them that the "Schily Makefilesystem" is not a set of scripts
but rather a program written in a non-algorithmic language called
"make". I also told them that even in case we really need to call the
Makefiles "scripts", the GPL does not require the "scripts" to be
published under GPL but any license is OK (there is no explicit
requirement for a license in the phrase that likes to see the "scripts"
OSS). I added that even in case that Debian likes to construe the GPL
in such a strange way that the "scripts" need to be put under GPL, the
GPL would then violate Debian Social Contract §9 and Debian then needs
to
call _all_ GPL programs non-free.
Note that the Debian Social Contract §9 (as §9 OSI) requires a license
not to contaminate other projects on the same "medium" and that the
"Schily Makefilesystem" is a separate project that is completely
project independent and older than cdrtools.
The climax of the first Debian attack against cdrtools has been in
February/March. In May 2006, I did change most programs (sub-projects) in
cdrtools to use the CDDL. It is interesting, that most Debian people did not
realize this and still write nonsense that does not apply at all now that
the license for most programs did change.
If you like to get an overview about the current licenses, please read the
file COPYING in the root directory of the cdrtools package.
> Debian does favor the GPL, I will admit, and I sometimes have a problem with
> it. I also feel at the same time that even though I don't believe in the GPL
> 100%, I feel there is reason to align with the rest of the open source
> community at large, which GPL unfortunately does.
Well, the important thig seems to be that someone from Debian told me that
thex do not follow their written down contract but "decide from case to case".
This could be called arbitraryness and makes a project like Debian extremely
suspect and anti-social.
> > I would he glad to see that it's not me who is the only person who is
> > fighting for unbiased views on Licenses. Discussions with Debian take a
> > looong time and are currently not fruitful at all.
>
> Again, I don't know of your discussions, but there might be something lost in
> the translation between all involved, that I don't know.
I have the converse impression: native english speakers seem to not read the
GPL in depth enogh as they believe that they understand the text easily.
In addition, many people never did read the GPL in depth enogh but rather
believe what's in various FAQs regardless whether these FAQs are correct.
> > I did just see some reports that have been created as cdrw does not write
> > with the AOpen drive in the Ultra-20. cdrw does not work and gives no
> > reason for this failure. Cdrecord does print an "imcompatible medium" error
> > message. BTW: this was Ritek DVD media wich is od very poor quality. It is
> > known that many drives will not work with them at all.
>
> But what does this mean? Chances are that new firmware is needed on the AOpen
> driver, won't be the first time I've seen that happen. In fact, there were
> some Sun servers which had AOpen drives and they needed a firmware update as
> well.
Cdrecord may complain about problems because (in contrary to cdrw) cdrecord
checks SCSI error codes. In such a case, cdrecord will not write to a medium
but cdrw may behave either as if it did write or not write also but does not
give any useful message for that problem.
> > Please do not use this Debian junk!
>
> I'm really sorry you feel that way. You're one of the very brilliant
> programmers that our community is so fortunate to have as a part of them. Yet
> you make it difficult at times to reason with. A lot is owed to you as you
> were one of the first people to get OpenSolaris to even boot by itself,
> AFAIK.
Debian maintainers make it difficult to deal with this problem in a different
way. I did already waste a lot of time with trying to explain the Debian
maintainers that the patches they apply to cdrecord do not help but rather
cause even more and more serious problems than the one they claim to fix.
I am willing to cooperate with any serious person, but if Debian maintainers
are not willing to accept that I know more about my software than they do, I
am lost.
> Nexenta has over 12,000 packages...it wasn't long ago when open source
> distributions didn't have a fraction of that number of packages, yet we have
> that on OpenSolaris in less than a year.
Do you like to restart the "which package system to use" diskcssion?
I still need to stay with my opinion that no package system is optimal that
is centric to a specific kernel (like the Debian system is).
> Leave star out of this conversation!<wink>
As you see from above, Debian did attack both projects (cdrtools and star) at
the same time.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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