Long time i don’t blog… i’m sorry i know i’m lazy.
I sent this mail to gentoo-dev mailing list today.
“Now i know the real story since i’ve been talking with Debian
Maintainers. So there’s isn’t anything to say but we are working close
to upstream and they actually offer commit access to maintainers of
another distros. Cdrkit project sounds much more like an open project
than cdrtools so i’ll be with them. This was pretty much what happened
with Xfree/Xorg. So cdrtools will be the “close” project and cdrkit the
“open” project. Like i said before Gentoo joined this new project.
Now the license problems are fixed and we can ship this on our portage
tree tarballs for our new releases etc…
The package is in the tree and it’s asking for testing before i can
remove it from pkg.mask and provide the cdrtools virtual.”
Ok i think i don’t have to tell anything more…
“Now i know the real story since i’ve been talking with Debian
Maintainers”..
-ironic-
well… good to see that you made yourself a clean picture of both sides of this argument…
-/ironic-
i hope loosing the work from joerg schilling will not be too hard a blow though…
Florian the other side (the JS ones) is the following:
I think it’s really silly to change something crucial as cdrtools which is making such a good job at burning cds under linux. It will be really hard to replace this excellent tool, because even though Schilling may be a difficult person he really has some expertise in a field that is difficult to replace. Have you already forgotten, that linux was years behind in cd burning? Now that there was cdrtools things got better, but no, some dispute over licenses (I think Schilly doesn’t realy care about the license but about more fundamental things with the debian community) sets us years back…
All because a stupid license dispute…. is that the opensource spirit? I don’t think so! I really don’t understand why other distros are so eager to follow debian. They should have waited first to see how things develop!
I thought the license problems are only Debian’s concern because it is a binary distribution. Gentoo however is source-based.
What is not clear from your announcement: Will cdrtools be removed or will users have the choice between cdrkit and cdrtools?
No cdrtools won’t be removed from Gentoo period. Our users will choose whatever they want.
If someone likes to give up real free software
in favor of software that has been born
and driven only from the hate of a single
person (Eduard Bloch) that tries to harm
OpenSource software, go ahead. You bet
on a dead horse…
It is nice to see that Gentoo gives the
users the freedom of the choice between
the free original and the outdated “fork”.