Fwd: [gNewSense-users] gNewsense: CDRTOOLS- gNS bug 108

[Kevin Dean]

Please forgive me if I've already forwarded this. I wrote a blurb the
first time and was interrupted.  I can't recall if I've sent this to
the list or not.

-Kevin


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joerg Schilling <address@hidden>
Date: Nov 14, 2007 12:06 PM
Subject: Re: [gNewSense-users] gNewsense: CDRTOOLS- gNS bug 108
To: address@hidden


"Kevin Dean" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Let me ask about the CDDL/GPL play between mkisofs. It appears that
> the CDDL was written specifically to be GPL incompatible. It also

This is a lie published by Danese Cooper.

All people I know who did work on the creation of the CDDL will explain you
that this claim from Danese is wrong.

Danese liked to see Sun using the GPL and become angry when the GPL
has not been choosen because of limitations in the GPL. Danese just did not
understand these limitations.

The Sun developers did not like to use the BSDl and they could not
use the GPL. In a discussion with them in September 2004, we agreed to
put no license detains into the OpenSolaris license that could prevent
to use e.g. Code from OpenSolaris in Linux.


> appears that the mkisofs utility is still licensed under the GPL
> (presumably because it's not all your code?) but pulls code from
> libscg (which is). It appears to me that this violates the terms of
> both licenses if someone wants to distribute a binary. It appears as

It does not violate any of the licenses.

The CDDL allows a combination with any other license and the GPL
does not prevent a GPL project from using non-GPL code.


> In your understanding, is this what happens? Does mkisofs in fact
> combine GPL and CDDL code?

No, mkisofs is a 100% GPL "work" that uses non-GPL libraries which
is permitted by the GPL. It is OK because this way no derived work
_from_ the GPL code is created.

> If this IS the case, what is the preferred way around this?

There is no need to work around it as there is no problem. The
distributions that asked their lawyers for checking the license
don't see any problem.


Jörg

--
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