John Goerzen <jgoer...@complete.org> wrote:
> Joerg Schilling wrote:
>
> >
> > The fork distributed by Debian may however be called dubious:
> >
> > - The fork is in conflict with the Copyright law and thus may not be
> > legally distributed.
>
> If your code was Free Software, then it is perfectly legal for Debian to
> do what it does.
It seems that you first need to learn what Free Software means and what
constraints the License and the Copyright law enforce. A Free software license
allows you to do many things, it does definitely not allow you what Debian did.
> If your code wasn't Free Software, then we wouldn't be using it in the
> first place.
> ISTR that your code WAS free, but now isn't.
The code that was taken by Debian for the fork WAS free but now it is no longer
because Debian did apply changes that are forbidden by law.
As you don't know what grants and what duties you have when dealing with free
software, please try to inform yourself. You may get into trouble if you change
things that are forbidden by law.
Let me quote the license person from the board of directors from the OpenSource
initiave:
No OpenSource license gives you all grants you need to change anything
in the source. If the authors or Copyright holders of a software like,
they may always sue you. If you like to avoid being sued, play nicely
with the Copyright holders.
Eduard Bloch made a big mistake, he started a deffamation campaign against
cdrtools and Debian made the mistake to support Eduard Bloch.
I don't know whether you are able to change the named mistake, but please note
that I am the copyright holder for the vast majority of the cdrtools code. I am
licensing the code and I am able to sue people for Copyright violations on the
code, Debian is not. If Debian claims they might be sued because of so called
license problems in the original software, this is just FUD. I am not
interested to sue people as long as there is a chance to have a solution that
does not need a court. If Debian however continues to attack me, Debian should
be aware that at some point I am forced to sue people for violating GPL and
Copyright law with the fork.
So let me ask: Is Debian willing to "play nicely" with me in the future or is
Debian interested in continuing the attacks?
In case you don't know: My main interest is to make sure that the software I
write remains free and I am doing whaterver I need to ensure this. The license
change in cdrtools is a _reaction_ on the attacks from Eduard Bloch. So whom
does Debian support? Is it Eduard Bloch who is the initiator of the attacks or
is Debian interested rather in Free Software?
I am writing Free Software since 1982, this is much longer than Debian exists.
I support Freedom and if Debian is against Freedom, I cannot support Debian.
Jörg
--
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