legal problem mkisofs genisoimage ?
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while playing around with mkisofs, noticing there is no man page, noticing mkisofs just points to genisoimage i found this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cdrkit/+bug/489077
and moreover this:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html
there seems to be some irritation on the licence, on original and illegal fork.
some distributions switching back from the possibly illegal fork to the original.
hmm, i don't fully understand the story, but figured the trisquel community might be interested and could help me to understand which of the programs are free software and which are not.
curious for your opinion and thanks
Mono
The CDDL, according to the Free Software Foundation, in contrast to the business oriented OSI, claims quite clearly that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL (any version).
This is due to the use of the term "Intellectual Property". This also shows the reason why the original author is making a claim on not allowing the tool's executable name to be used.
Because of this, Debian created a fork. Now, the original author appears within these posts just to fight against Debian, as if Debian maintainers don't do there homework carefully. This is obviously odd, as Debian is a leading distribution (whereof Trisquel is an indirect decendant) known to be extremely stable.
It is true there is no "man" page, but there is an "info" page, so there again is no reason to have this weirdness going on.
The claims about not being allowed to use the name as executable are false as well. There appears to be no trademark, and therefore, anyone can use this name. Copyright does not equal trademark.
> This is due to the use of the term "Intellectual Property".
Not all licenses using this term are GPL-incompatible, see
e.g. https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CeCILL (most are, the
reasons to use this term and to make GPL-incompatible licenses are
probably correlated).
> It is true there is no "man" page, but there is an "info" page, so
> there again is no reason to have this weirdness going on.
Both kinds of documentation have different uses.
(I like your concise explanation of these licensing issues.)
> http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html
>
> there seems to be some irritation on the licence, on original and
> illegal fork.
> some distributions switching back from the possibly illegal fork to
> the original.
There are obvious things that its maintainer could do if he wanted it to
be used in GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. use a GPL-compatible permissive
license instead of CDDL). The issue of changing program names in
modified versions is mentioned by the FSF, this requirement is barely
acceptable in some cases
(https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#LPPL-1.2) and is not
considered to be required by the GPL. There probably are better
arguments to use if there really is a GPL violation.
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