| Branden Robinson 2004-10-09, 2:47 am |
| I don't know about anyone else, but I am tired of reading about the
petulant behavior of cdrtools's upstream author ([1][2][3]).
Mr. Schilling is clearly unhappy with his choice of the GNU GPL for his
software. That is his prerogative, but in my view he causes too much chaos
and confusion by continuing to add GPL-incompatible riders to his license.
He is furthermore unwilling to pay heed to the needs of the community,
which requires that important tools like cdrecord be under the stewardship
of a non-mercurial personality (at least when it comes to licensing
decisions).
It's time to fork. Let us work with the rest of the community to
standardize on a new set of tools based on the last free version of
cdrtools, thank Mr. Schilling for his valuable contributions, and leave him
be to pursue his interests in proprietary software without interference
or argument from us. He appears to regard placing his work under the plain
vanilla GNU GPL that works for so many projects as an act that he cannot
perform in good conscience. Let us stop placing him in that uncomfortable
position.
[The subject is a reference to a famous quote by John Gilmore.]
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/97469/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=265546
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=270060
--
G. Branden Robinson | If you want your name spelled
Debian GNU/Linux | wrong, die.
branden@debian.org | -- Al Blanchard
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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