Mr. Callaway,
in a previous mail you did already admit that you are not a lawyer. In your
last mail you verified that you do not understand that background of the case
and that you did not ask a lawyer for help.
I don't know your position in Redhat, but as long as you do net get informed,
it seems that you are the wrong person to talk to. Would you please be so kind
to direct the discussion to the right people?
You last mail contains close to no valid claim, let me comment your claims
anyhow in hope that it helps you to begin to understand the problem.
"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa(a)redhat.com> wrote:
You seem to have several concerns here. I will again attempt, for
the
sake of clarity, to separate them and address them individually.
I) The software "cdrkit" is full of well known bugs, and missing key
features.
This point may or may not be correct, however, the presence of bugs and
the absence of features do not cause any legal concerns, short of
possible warranty issues, but those are thoroughly disclaimed by the
license (GPLv2) on cdrkit:
Here you seem to missunderstand the OSS community. Redhat is a OSS
redistributor. OSS redistributors depend on the work of OSS authors and thus
should collaborate with them. Redhat also has customers and customers don't
like to be forced by their distributor to use defective software when they
know that there is also software without known bugs.
It seems that you still did not yet read:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html
as it lists some of the bugs and missing features in the fork. Given the fact
that redhat installations default to a UTF-8 based locale, it seems to be
extremely unwise to distribute a fork that does not correctly support UTF-8
while the original software has no problem with UTF-8 locales. Is this
a result of the unawareness of an US citizen that is only used to use 7 bit
US-ASCII?
II) "...many Linux users have become upset from the results of
a
completely unneeded conflict initiated by the non-cooperative
"downstream" package maintainer."
There are 11 open Fedora bugs against cdrkit. None of them reflect this
claim. Nevertheless, even if it was true, it does not reflect a legal or
licensing concern.
I don't care about the numbers you give me, I however care about reality
and if you sum up all unfixed bugs from all Linux distributors that distribute
cdrkit, I see a total of more than 100 unfixed bugs.
You should also look at the bugs for cdrkit in redhat, suse, debian, ubuntu and
mandriva and you of course also need to check the bug lists for brasero on these
distributions. It is most unlikely that the bugs listed there do not apply to
redhat.
III) There are no licensing incompatibilities in the current
"cdrtools"
software.
This is patently false, and it was the primary reason why Red Hat/Fedora
no longer include the "cdrtools" software. "cdrtools" bundles and
depends upon GPL licensed software components, while the code codebase
of "cdrtools" is under the CDDL license. The CDDL has been reviewed by
multiple organizations, including the FSF and Red Hat Legal, and they
agree in the assessment that dependent combinations of CDDL and GPL code
result in an incompatible work. In addition, there is ample
documentation that this was the intention of the CDDL license authors
(Sun), to prevent code sharing/compatibility with the Linux kernel.
Your claim is obviously false and I mentioned already that the Sun legal
departement did a full legal review on cdrtools and could not find any
license or legal problem in the original cdrtools. Your claim that the CDDL
was designed to be incompatible with the GPL is a fairytale that is spread by
people that like to harm OSS collaboration. Simon Phipps did confirm that this
is not true and you should believe in what the official Sun OSS Evangelist
says.
Regarding your claims about the FSF: the FSF did not review cdrtools and the
FSF is even completely irrelevant for this case. The FSF does not own any
rights on cdrtools and the FSF does not distribute the original software. With
respect to the original cdrtools software, the FSF is no more than an uninvolved
third party.
BTW: With respect to derived work from cdrtools, the FSF is a Copyright
violator as the FSF publishes vcdimager and as vcdimager claims that all code
is under GPL but the Reed Solomon coder implementation in vcdimager is based on
code that intentionally never has been published under GPL. You can check this
with the Author of the Code Heiko Eißfeldt.
I personally spoke to Simon Phipps on this subject, and he feels that
it
may be possible to avoid the CDDL/GPL license compatibility concerns by
using the Sun Studio toolchain rather than GCC. In discussing this
possibility with Red Hat Legal, we disagree with Simon's assessments, so
even if Fedora/Red Hat included the Sun Studio toolchain (we do not
currently do so), we do not agree that its use resolves the licensing
concerns here.
Let me asume that you do not _intentionally_ spread FUD....
.... you then at least confirm that you did miss everything that is important
for our case. It should be obvious that you cannot use a different GPL
interpretation depending on which project you are talking about. Iff redhat
believes in the strange claims from Eduard Bloch, then it should be obvious
that you would need to apply his claim to all software redhat distributes.
This would make it impossible to distribute redhat and this would in addition
make the GPL a clearly non-free license. Note that the FSF insists that the
GPL has to interpreted in a way that would make it compatible to the OSS
definition at:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Using SunStudio to compile your code could help to avoid some of the problems
you only have if you believe in the claims from Eduard Bloch as SunStudio may
help to avoid having code from the GNU libc inside the binaries that have been
created from GPLd sources, even in case of dynamic linking. In short, this
assumption would force you to convert your master libc source to GPL and in
return forbid you to distribute any X based GUI binaries.
If you don't understand this, ask your lawyers or read the GPL explanation from
Lawrence Rosen at:
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
IV) Some of the changes in "cdrkit" introduced Copyright
law violations
and even GPL violations.
To date, you have never provided anyone with any evidence of specific
examples of code in "cdrkit" which violates Copyright law or the terms
of the GPL. In our previous private discussions, I repeatedly requested
specific examples, but you were entirely unable or unwilling to present
these. Therefore, I am forced to assume that they do not exist.
As mentioned before, the facts have been presented to the people who are
responsible for the Copyright violation. I provided the information to the
Debian BTS and some people at Debian preferred to hide the related bug entry
instead of discussing it. These people reject to fix the legal problems they
introduced and as the fork is full of bugs, it is not apropritate
to put any effort in the illegal fork.
I am not willing to give the bug id to a public mailing list as the thread is
full of personal insults. I am however willing to discuss things in private
communication.
The easy fix for your problem is to start distributing the legal original
software instead of the illegal fork. I am willing to discuss with you a path
that leads within some time in the near future, to redhat distributing again
the legal original software instead of the illegal fork.
****
So, in summary, you have failed to raise any valid concerns about Red
Hat/Fedora's inclusion of "cdrkit". In addition, the situation which
prevents Red Hat/Fedora from including "cdrtools" remains unchanged.
In Summary, you did not ask a real informed lawyer.
If you don't like to be seen as a OSS hostile person, you should stop spreading
FUD on the original software and if you really believe that there is a problem
I would of course be happy to discuss your arguments. Up to now, you
unfortunately did not send any new arguments, the old ones have already been
refuted.
You currently really have a legal problem that you need to fix. I recommend you
to do this in a gentlemen like way - so please present facts if you see things
different to me.
In my opinion, in the opinion of my lawyer and in the opinion of the Sun legal
department there is no need to dual license cdrtools as there is no legal problem
in cdrtools.
Note that the copyright violation in the fork was introduced by Germans in
Germany on code that was written by Germans in Germany. You are distributing
cdrkit in Germany so it is obvious that you need to read the German Copyright
law at:
http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/index.html
As mentioned several times already, I recommend you to consult a lawyer in
order to get help to understand your situation.
I am OSS oriented, so I am interested in fostering OSS against attacks and I
hope that you finally are OSS oriented too.
Best regards
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js(a)cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily