[arch-general] An old, tiresome discussion: cdrtools vs cdrkit

[Joerg Schilling]

Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> That could be the reason of this new project...
> https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6137

This is an attack against OpenSource. How do you judge on an entity that
starts to publish source tar archives with names and revisions numbers from 
extremely old OSS packages but doing this with content that is not identical 
with the original?

See:

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/mkisofs/old/mkisofs-1.13.tar.gz

This is from July 2000....

And there was even already a mkisofs-1.14. As I am the official maintainer of 
mkisofs (selected by the original author), nobody can rightfully use the name
"mkisofs" unless he used the original code. The permission to change the code
(from the GPL) is a different thing but the GPL does not include more than the 
right to use and to change the code.

> The link in the announcement is broken, but it is easy to find in the
> same ftp, and the Download links in the top leads directly to it :
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/isofsmk/

and  of you have a closer look at this, you see that they started with an 
extremely old version of mkisofs that misses all features that are important 
today and that is full of bugs. Not looking at things like libfind, that
allows recent mkisofs to include the features of the find(1) command and not 
looking at the Apple HFS code, the current mkisofs is at least 5x more code than
the source from y2000 and the new version has no known bugs.

Now that you found it, I tell you an interesting aspect of the announcement:

The FSF says "we cannot use it in GNU" but they do not say it's illegal.
This is a confirmation that even the FSF believes that there is no problem
with the original software. They just cannot legally integrate code pieces 
from cdrtools into their prijects.....

Hey stop, they already did and for this reason the FSF currently is the biggest
Copyright violator on code taken from cdrtools:

The "GNU projects" vcdimager and libcdio are both based on code from cdrtools.
The code that was taken by the FSF was never published under a license that 
would allow relicensing under GPLv3. So where is the "innocence" of the FSF?

> If mkisofs is the only doubtful part, why not replacing only mkisofs ?
> Wouldn't that be better than replacing everything ?

This is simple: in contrary to others (e.g. Debian and the FSF) I honor license
regulations by original authors as long as their contribution is still visible.

> Joerg already said that mkisofs received the most code changes, and
> that genisoimage was quite problematic :
> "genisoimage does not support UTF-8 and large files and creates
> filesystem images with lots of bugs."
>
> I am sure he will have plenty of nice things to say about isofsmk as well !

mkisofs-1.12b5 (this is what they are currently publishing) has the following 
issues:

-	No large file support

-	No working Rock Ridge support

-	No working graft points

-	It creates rotten directory entries

-	No Apple HFS

-	No UDF (needed for DVDs)

-	Well this implies no DVD-Video

-	Not yet working Joliet

-	No UTF-8 support

-	It eats big amounts of memory

-	.... there are many more issues, but I like to come to an end ;-)

The only change (despite what they clame) was to start to translate texts.
For me, correct code is more important than internationalization. For this 
reason, text translations are planned in the original for the development cycle 
past release 3.0.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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