Talk:Cdrtools/Archive 1

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I'm unsure whether to say that cdrtools is a program or a collection of programs. Should cdrecord and mkisofs be mentioned in the article as a part of cdrtools?

I definitely think so. I was redirected from cdrecord and I'm betting mkisofs redirects as well. I was hoping to find some help with the blasted program. If I ever figure it out properly, I might post some stuff if no one else does. marnues 03:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

In fact it is acollection of programs including those mentioned in the unsigned above comment. I haveexpanded the article a bit to include thos things. I tried to take the German version as base, but as my German knowledge is too poor i couldn't translate it properly nor in its entirety. So, maybe someone could still add some things by translating the German or French versions, which seem to have some information still missing here. --Pfc432 16:23, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I think cdda2wav is in cdrtools, although I'm not sure he's the original author of that. Also, the GPLed version of cdrecord never recorded DVDs; that required a pro version. I should mention the dvdrecord command in dvdrtools... - Pronoiac 07:54, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

In the third paragraph, what is "discographics", and what were the problems that led to the change in licensing? 05:23, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Removals by 195.37.79.37

I am rolling back to the revision before Jörg Schilling's edits. Jörg, if you want to remove content again, explain why here. Regarding the removal of the link to cdrkit because it would be a dead fork, cdrkit is not known to be dead. If you want to remove the link on the basis that it is, provide evidence. Note that even if cdrkit was dead, removing the link to it would probably be a bad idea. --Chealer 02:11, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

• Well, the last release of cdrkit was 3 months ago. -- Yuhong 05:02, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

How to keep Wikipedia neutral

Do not add unproven claims.

Do not edit attempts to show the other side of a controversial statements unless you verified the statements of both sides.

If you cannot create a balanced text, remove all controversial sections.

Do not use Wikipedia to advertize for projects with commercial background from within articles for free software. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.190.210.114 (talk) 09:46, August 26, 2007 (UTC)

"Do not attempt to show the other side..."? That's crazy. I'm not trying to add unproven claims, I'm asking you to source yours. I have no idea where you got that date from for the shutdown of cdrkit. If it's real, source it. Anyway, I've done as you've said, and removed one of the controversial sections. Niten 16:38, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Non neutral claims in the editorial parts

Do not put non neutral claims in the editorial part of WP.

It is sufficient to have these claims readable in pointers in the links part. The specific wording that was removed tries to create the impression that there is a license problem but there is none. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.190.230.77 (talk) 16:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

"In the opinion of most observers, this change makes it impossible to legally distribute cdrtools binaries since the requirements of the GPL and CDDL conflict."

I'm putting back this sentence. Do not remove it again on the basis that it is an unproven legal claim. It is a statistic about the opinion of observers on a legal topic.--Chealer 03:10, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I suggest the tone of that statement to be modified to not state "most observers" because at first- and second-glance it reads at worst like a blatant non-POV statement and at best like an unbecoming weasel word. Re-wording the statement with a more positive tone would improve the article greatly. My suggestion is "The distribution of cdrtools binaries is problematic because the requirements of the GPL and CDDL conflict, according to observers." That statement is much more encyclopaedic than the negative tone that the user Chealer threatens an edit war over. --KJRehberg (talk) 18:54, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Um - where's the evidence that this is the opinion of most observers?

The article is unbalanced and it seems that for claims that attack the project, there is no need for evidence while other information is removed even if it is confirmed with primary sources. So far, none of the claims about so called license problems could be verified by quoting the GPL text and the Sun legal department confirms the absence of legal problems with the original software. This is why Sun only published the original software. Schily (talk) 15:19, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Major distributions using cdrtools?

Are there any major distributions that are (still) using cdrtools?--Hhielscher (talk) 08:08, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

• I don't know if it's a major distribution for you :-) but Slackware still provides updated packages of cdrtools. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.164.24.247 (talk) 17:56, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
• Gentoo ships both cdrtools and cdrkit. --ColdWind (talk) 16:36, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

• uhh, any UNIX operating system other than Linux? For what it's worth, FreeBSD allows installation of either, (though who in their right mind would want to go to a fork with fewer features, more bugs and a more restrictive license?) though I wouldn't be surprised if cdrkit didn't work on the other BSDs, or on Solaris. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.90.217.240 (talk) 20:40, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Sun (with Solaris) always distributed the original software, the same applies to Slackware. Recently, most Linux distributions started to distribute the original cdrtools again. Debian did agree on Marh 6th 2009 (at CeBIT) to distribute the original cdrtools again (although Debian is soooooo slooooow with doing the right things and we are still waiting for the contract to be implemented by Debian - the binary packages are waiting for integration since 5 months) and Suse distributes cdrtools again since two months. It seems that only RedHat defies to do things to the benefit of the users. The attack against the cdrtools project that created the fork seems to have been revealed as an attack against the Linux users as it is obvious that Linux users do not like to be forced to use a buggy fork while the maintained original software is legally available. Schily (talk) 15:29, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

List of supported OS

Please follow the WP rules and do not remove proven facts. The list of supported OS is the official list from the project that has been carefully proven for correctness. Schily (talk) 22:53, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

The following comment is not particularly appropriate for a Talk page, but, if I may, since most of the available information for your project is presented on a single, very large page, a table of contents and reasonable anchor ids would make referring to important sections (such as the list of supported operating systems, lost somewhere in the middle of said page) much easier.

More on topic, I have added clarifying language to the section in question, and removed the request for citations on that section. Was this the only section requiring additional citations, and can the notice at the top of the page now be removed? Or is there more... --Wlerin (talk) 06:41, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Legal Opinion?

"In August 2008, Mark Shuttleworth offered to ask the Software Freedom Law Center for a legal opinion on whether cdrtools could be included in Ubuntu, provided Schilling agreed to accept the opinion.[8]" Surely 2 years is a long enough time to get that legal opinion and for Sun Legal to respond. From Ubuntu minutes (ref 8) "Action: Mark to contact Sun legal regarding cdrtools" What was the outcome? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.117.109.20 (talk) 17:32, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Is there some third party, SFLC or not, that has made an explicit statement about the compatibility of cdrtools with GPL? Diego Moya (talk) 18:04, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

There is an explicit statement from the Sun legal department from August-November 2008 (approved by the director on November 11 2008) and another one from this year made by the Oracle legal department under different rules. But both declare cdrtools legal.

In addition, all lawyers that did write about similar constellations confirm that there is no problem because this would be done as collective work. In addition, Eben Moglen did confirm to me on October 1 2008 that the GPL license FAQ regarding general GPL compatibility from the FSF is wrong as it relies on an incorrect theory of GPL/BSD compatibility and on October 14 2008 (both in private mail) that there is no legal problem with cdrtools.

There is not a single reasoned and correclty quoted claim from any lawyer that would describe a problem. --Schily (talk) 12:09, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

This does not answer the original question. Was this ever submitted to the SFLC, and if so, what was the outcome?--Wlerin (talk) 06:42, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Section Software that can use cdrtools

Please add a {{see also|List_of_optical_disc_authoring_software#Linux_and_Unix{{!}}List of optical disc authoring software}}. I can't do that on my own, as the page appears to have been protected from writing. Thanks --151.75.47.146 (talk) 08:03, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Jörg Schilling‎‎ article

I've blanked and redirected the Jörg Schilling‎ article here following discussion at its talk page, as there are not enough reliable sources to support a WP:BLP there. You can still access its contents at the article's history. Diego (talk) 16:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Helpful list of GNU/Linux distros that have CDRtools already built-in and ready to use

in regards to edit (revision) # 587019011:

I added the below content to this article.

This list is based upon personal experience of having booted up and used these handy live .isos:

bundled with

cdrtools is already pre-installed in the following distros:

Absolute Linux

package list

"ap/cdrtools-3.01a08-i486-1.txz"

live

These can just be booted up without installing:

Recovery is Possible	Changelog	"13.1 - 6/5/2011 Updated cdrtools 3.01a05"]
System Rescue CD	Detail packages list	"cdrtools-3.01_alpha17 "
Parted Magic	[1], [2]	"cdrtools - allows recording to CD/DVD/BluRay media" -[3]
Sabayon KDE	[4] [5] [6]	"app-cdr/cdrtools-3.01_alpha15"
WifiSlax
SalixOS (SalixLive)	[7]	(at least KDE edition(s))
SlavankaOS	Recovery LiveCD 3.1	"cdrtools-3.01a08-i486-1"	based upon Slackware

end-user advantages of mkiSOfs over genISOimage

From my experience using mkisofs and genisoimage, I prefer the former for several concrete reasons:

killer feature

By default genisoimage (and mkisofs) will stop building the ISO 9660 filesystem once certain types of errors are encountered. For many end-user purposes, this is not desirable behaviour. Fortunately, the developer of the proper cdrtools included (an option that isn't in genisoimage/cdr-kit):

ERRCTL="WARN|ALL *"

That instructs mkisofs to simply ignore ANY and all errors (issues/problems) that it encounters when accessing source files during the building process. This is particularly useful when those source files are not locally stored but instead are accessed over a network connection.

Also,

timestamps

Since so-called alpha release 13 (cdrtools 3.01a13)

[...]UDF, supports all three Unix times with microsecond granularity in UDF

- " 3.01a13 26 Feb 2013 19:17"

I have used this and it works brilliantly.

Before that, in 2012, long-rr-time switch was added. Unfortunately, the Linux kernel can't handle these timestamps.

Mkisofs now supports sub-second time stamp granularity with Rock Ridge and the option "-long-rr-time".

- " 3.01a01 25 Nov 2010 12:35"

Now, that just concerns timestamps. However, the improvements and advantages are hardly limited to those examples above. If you read the full context [8] (Softpedia mirror of changelog) of the events in the changelog for mkisofs, you'll see MANY improvements (that leave the already-buggy genisoimage in the dust) that cover a broader range of functionality and power and flexibility. This ranges from EFI boot to "suid" (3.01a14) [9].

Features: cdrecord does not offer DAO , and instead SAO

under (h2) "Features"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cdrtools&action=edit&section=17

• several burning modes, such as Track-At-Once and Disc-At-Once

Actually, Disc-at-Once is not available with cdrecord. Instead, Session-at-Once. When the -dao switch is used in an invocation of cdrecord, S.A.O. is used. The relevant switches are "-tao" (which is the default write mode) and "-sao"

Bottom line: Please correct the mention of "Disc-At-Once" in that sentence to instead say "Session-At-Once"

The open source app for burning CD-Rs in DAO mode is cdrdao.

Many sources that I have read online have this wrong. One example is "CD Writing Using cdrecord", which is a nice page, otherwise, by the way.

In fact, the official man page has this language:

-sao	Set SAO (Session At Once) mode which is usually called Disk At Once mode. This currently only works with MMC drives that sup- port Session At Once mode.

The language in that man page probably is from the late 1990s when the MMC standard was new and many of the burner (devices) that were used with cdrecord were pre-MMC.

Anyway, this is why KDE's k3b optical disc app is usually bundled with (and serves as a nice graphical GUI front-end to) cdrdao in addition to cdrtools (like mkisofs and cdrecord, particularly) (as well as growisofs). Otherwise, what would the need for cdrdao be? What would it offer (at least for data content, if not CDDA) that cdrecord lacks?

Fleetwoodta (talk) 12:49, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

so-called "alpha" releases are as good as stable, right?

Jeorg Schilling (the maintainer / developer), has his own way of doing things.

One of these peculiar practices is labelling each release (roll-out) of his codebase (each incremental improvement (or tweak?)) as an "alpha" release. So far 19 alpha releases have taken place since the release of 3.00. This is misleading. It led System Rescue CD to only offer 3.00 which missing out on numerous advances that the subsequent "alpha" releases offer. Most other distros that have cdrtools in their repos offer one of the subsequent "alpha" revisions (see table in main article). Recently, however, System Rescue CD broke from its pattern: http://www.sysresccd.org/Detailed-packages-list.

B.T.W. has Jeorg ever released his codebase as a "beta"? I point that out to help provide perspective on this (his usage of "alpha" in identifying/labelling the releases of his software).

Fleetwoodta (talk) 13:22, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

proposal for intro to article

cdrtools (formerly known as cdrecord) is a suite of software for optical media.

The most important parts of the package are:

1. cdrecord, which activates the burn laser of an optical disc drive to physically write content to optical discs (media)
2. mkisofs, an ISO9660 filesystem volume image creator.
3. cdda2wav, an audio CD extractor (or "ripper") that uses libparanoia

Because these tools do not include any GUI, many graphical front-ends have been created. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fleetwoodta (talk • contribs) 04:29, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Please keep the article encyclopedic!

Things such as download location lists, detailed feature sets etc. belong to the manual and homepage of the software, not into Wikipedia.

This isn't a replacement homepage of cdrecord, but an encyclopedia:

In particular: Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable

Thank you. --178.7.182.200 (talk) 13:28, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Semi-protection of cdrtools

Hi. Semi-protection (with the "small=yes" variant of Template:pp-vandalism) on cdrtools would be very welcome because since 7 August 2013 all anonymous edits (except this one with typo fixes) come from a single user (same country, same mobile phone ISP, same city) :

Date	Contributions
2014-01-24	178.2.132.136
2013-12-27	94.216.204.140
2013-12-26	94.216.83.114
2013-12-25	188.98.221.232

The user behind these edits is obviously an experienced Wikipedia contributor and probably already has a wikipedia account, but he prefers to do anonymous edits. If all of his edits did respect the rules, I would not be writing this. But he did a few bad edits :

• vandalism by 188.98.221.232 on 25 December 2013 with an offending hidden wikicode comment
• vandalism by 178.2.132.136 on 24 January 2014 with a false summary (This edit is vandalism because a reference with a valuable link to an official article of an US Government site has been removed. I have restored it recently).

If new bad and anonymous edits occur again, I'll request semi-protection.

Ekkt0r (talk) 07:50, 28 January 2014 (UTC). Edited: 08:10, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Enough with the synthesis and original research

User:Schilly, you have an more than evident conflict of interest in this page. The sentence you keep re-adding makes the paragraph look like cdrtools itself can be freely distributed, which is in no way supported by the reference you provided, which is about open source in general and in no way related to the topic of this article. As a user with a COI shouldn't be editing here in the first place, please refrain from re-adding it or I will seek remedy. Diego (talk) 14:20, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

If you don't understand English well enough, stop editing articles in the english wikipedia! In the past someone did repeatedly ask for a citation on why/whether OpenSource licenses do not grant to use the original name of the project after changes have been made. You removed the citation that proves this fact, so your edit must be seen as vandalism. Schily (talk) 12:43, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

The reference you need is not for why/whether OpenSource licenses in general grant reusing a name change or not. The contention point was for why the license change was problematic in the specific case of cdrtools, where there were more issues at hand than a single renaming of the project (namely, the license change of the makefiles), as the Debian developers explained (as well as Jonathan Corbet and the Free Software Foundation). Your general citation doesn't address these particular points, and thus doesn't support your claim that cdrtools in particular could be redistributed. Diego (talk) 13:46, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

So why did you remove the given reference? Schily (talk) 10:53, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Because it's unrelated to the topic. It doesn't say anything about cdrtools Diego (talk) 13:24, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

If your english is so bad that you do not understand that a general explanation about the relation of OpenSource licenses and trademarks answers the specific question you asked, please stop editing this article. Schily (talk) 15:17, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Is your English so bad that you don't understand our policy against original research and synthesis of published sources? You can't use a general reference to support a particular case - it's explicitly against the rules: "Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not clearly advanced by the sources themselves". A general source about trademarks and free source is not a valid reference for the assertion that cdrtools can be distributed with GPL software, when the source doesn't mention cdrtools at all. You want to introduce in the article something that, being generous, amounts to the following syllogism:

1. trademark law does not prevent free software from being distributed;
2. the only possible restriction for distributing cdrtools with GPL would be trademark law;
3. therefore, cdrtools can be distributed with GPL software.

I asked a reference for 3. Your reference only supports 1, and there is no source for 2 (in fact, we have a source supporting that 2 is false, the Debian's POV). You'll need a third-party source asserting 3 directly, or lacking that, somebody asserting both that 2 is true and that the above syllogism is a valid one to make. And even then, 3 can only be included as the claim by one of the parts; the counter-claim made by the various distros (that cdrtools was not safe to include in them) still needs to be included for balance and to achieve a neutral point of view, i.e. reporting what both opposite sides stated. I didn't invent those rules, they are the general agreement by the community on how articles should be written. Is it clear now? Diego (talk) 22:25, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Your recent text is completely unrelated to the vandalism done by you.

What really happened is:

1. I added a note that informs anbout the well known fact that OpenSource Licenses do not handle trademarks and thus modified OSS programs cannot be legally published under the original name.
2. You claimed that this was "original research"
3. I added a citation from a legal faculty of a US university that confirms that OSS licenses do not permit to use the original name for modified OSS programs
4. You removed that citation

You obviously have no good faith interests in the cdrtools WP article. Schily (talk) 11:34, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Repeated vandalism by User:Diego Moya

Diego Moya did more than once remove a correct citation that points to the faculty of law of the University of Washington. I am no longer willing to tolerate such a behavior as it's intention is to introduce false claims into the article.

Tis action is particularly bad as he tries to call his action "removal of original research" in order to confuse people about his real intention which is vandalism.

Looking at the section "The licensing issue" however identifies several claims that are really "original research" added by Debian sockpuppets that have the intention to harm the cdrtools project. The problem with several wordings is to make claims from Debian (that have been proven wrong) appear as if they might be correct. This is at least POV that does not belong into Wikipedia. Schily (talk) 12:40, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

You should review your vocabulary. The term WP:Vandalism does not apply to attempts to improve the encyclopedia, no matter how misguided or disruptive they might be, and accusing someone of it merely because they disagree with you is bad faith. I'm not attempting to claim that Debian was right; I try to avoid that you claim that they were wrong in the article as a fact. You cannot use a general reference about free software to justify your claim that distributing cdrtools was allowed all the time; since that was the particular point of contention from the beginning, to comply with NPOV we have to include your claim that the license change was compatible with the GPL, but also Debian's claim that it was not. You'll need a reliable reference speaking about cdrtools in particular for the first.

I'm requesting a third opinion on this particular point. However I feel in the need to point out to other editors your obvious conflict of interest (User:Schily has self-identified in the past as Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrtools. See also his blog with the same user name). Diego (talk) 13:38, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Removing information from the text, in special as this information was written by the juristic faculty of the university of washington, cannot be seen as an improvement. I have no other way as calling this vandalism. Given the fact that it was you who asked for a citation on this statement, it seems that you are not interested in improving this article.

I have the impression that you are in an conflict of interest and your own interest is to prevent improving this article. Schily (talk) 10:50, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Schilly, you are on the wrong end of this conflict. Accusing an editor of vandalism without a clear cut case for it is a personal attack as are your unfounded accusations of a conflict of interest. What you have is a content dispute and whether you agree with the reasoning provided...it was provided. You have already violated a number of our guidelines and policies. I suggest you strike out your unfounded accusations before this moves forward as it isn't helping your case in the least.--Mark Miller (talk) 23:53, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Before attacking other people, I recomend you to inform yourself about the facts on the history of the vandalism. Schily (talk) 11:36, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

I asked for a citation claiming that cdrtools can be distributed together with some GPL software. The source that you provided doesn't say that cdrtools can be distributed together with GPL software, so I see removing it as an improvement. We have different interpretations of what "improving the article" entails. Diego (talk) 13:25, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

So you claim that you no longer understand what you asked for? You definitely did not ask anything about the GPL but you asked for a confirmation that OpenSource licenses do not grant rights on trademarks. The latter was answered and then removed by you. Given the fact that you removed text that answeres a question you asked for, your behavior cannot be seen as friendly. Schily (talk) 15:13, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Can you exactly point out where you saw me asking for confirmation that open source licenses don't grant rights on trademarks, or anything at all about cdrtool's name? As far as my memory serves me, the confirmation I've always requested is for the fact that cdrtools can be distributed in GPL compilations under any other name, which is a different claim altogether. Your exact words that are unsuported and therefore original research were "making the file compatible with the OpenSource definition", where "the file" is the LIMITATIONS file containing the added invariant section which includes additional restrictions. There's nothing in your source addressing the distribution of that file, and per my above reasoning a general reference about Open Source software is not valid support for the second claim under Wikipedia rules. Diego (talk) 14:13, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Do you like to tell us that you did not read the text you removed? Schily (talk) 16:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

You haven't read what I've written just above your last reply? It contains the text that you wrote and I removed. Of course I have read what you wrote, how else could I have copied it here? Diego (talk) 17:21, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I of course did read what you wrote, your text contains some words that might be related to the problem but the overall meaning seems to be unrelated.

What happened is:

1. I added a note that informs anbout the well known fact that OpenSource Licenses do not handle trademarks and thus modified OSS programs cannot be legally published under the original name.
2. You claimed that this was "original research"
3. I added a citation from a legal faculty of a US university that confirms that OSS licenses do not permit to use the original name for modified OSS programs
4. You removed that citation

Could you explain why you removed text that:

1. explains why forbidding certain modifications without changing the name at the same time thus is not contradicting OSS licenses
2. a citation that confirms the above statement

If your intention is to improve the article, we should immeditely restore the text you removed. If you still don't understand the text, we may enhance it... Schily (talk) 17:59, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

If you keep arguing against things that I haven't said, while ignoring what I have actually said, it's impossible to have a rational conversation.

As I have repeatedly stated, my claim of original research is not about your "What happened" #1 claim above, that "modified OSS programs cannot be legally published under the original name". The OR problem is related your second list, the "text that explains why... is not contradicting OSS licenses", because:

A) this claim is totally unrelated to the reasons why cdrtools may not be distributed (and therefore has no place in the article). cdrtools may not be distributed with GPL because the LIMITATIONS invariant and the CDDL license are adding extra restrictions even if the re-publishers use a different name; and,

B) you're using the above source to feign an non-existing support to the claim that "any Open Source tool can be distributed, under any possible circumstances, with the only condition that it changes the original name", which

1) it's not what the source says, and

2) even if the source said that (which it doesn't), a general reference talking about open source in general cannot be used to support a claim about a particular instance of open source software. It's forbidden. Taboo. Against the rules. Not nice.

Until you recognize that the WP:SYNTH policy exists (i.e. that the reference provided must address the software in particular, not just the general class to which it belongs, and that a "precise analysis must have been published by a reliable source in relation to the topic before it can be published on Wikipedia"), there's no point in continuing this conversation. Diego (talk) 21:51, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I am sorry to see that you continue to claim a false background about your vandalism. You removed a citation that confirms that OSS licenses do not include the permission to use the original name of a project and this citation was part of an explanation about why an "invariant section" (for modified code that does not use a different name) is not a OSS violation. Your repetaed claims in the discussion here are completely unrelated to your vandalism. As you could not give a reason why this text should be removed from the article, I suggest to revert your deletion. Schily (talk) 11:19, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I have given a reason, and the only argument that you have provided against it is "it's false". If you re-introduce your unsupported explanation, I will follow every step in the dispute resolution process until the article is restored to a neutral point of view. This may involve additional references that explain the situation in more detail, or may simply require removing again any instance of "synthesis of published material that advances a position not explicitly stated by any of the sources." Diego (talk) 13:39, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

As long as you try to justify your removal with claims that do not apply to the removed text, I have no idea how to have a fact based discussion with you. Schily (talk) 17:05, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Are you implying that the WP:SYNTH policy should not be applied to this article? Diego (talk) 17:27, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Your claim does apply to the text snipplets that quote the FSF and Corbet (so these parts need to be removed). Your claim however does not apply to the citation that verifies that OSS licenses do not grant rights on trademarks. Schily (talk) 17:55, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I've never said that the source doesn't support that "OSS licenses do not grant rights on trademarks". But my claim applies to the part where you say that cdrtools is GPL compatible, as your source doesn't say that. Have you actually read the Trademark and OSS article? It contains one example of a free license, the Academic Free License that can't be used with GPL software. So we could equally use your source to say "Publishing modified code under another name is forbidden when trademark guidelines are incompatible with the license". Diego (talk) 05:20, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Let's make peace, shall we ?

I think most people who are saying bad things about Jörg Schilling are not well informed. You are free to think whatever you want about me, but please don't waste your time replying to me because I won't reply.

I just want to kindly invite all potential contributors to first make your own opinion about :

• how the dispute between Debian and Schilling started;
• the CDDL and why it is approuved by OSI;
• the real reasons why Debian forked cdrtools.

If you follow this kind advice, you will sooner or later be glad you did not take part in the dispute.

Kind regards, Ekkt0r (talk) 01:46, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, it would be great if that information would be included in the article itself, so that readers of this article can use it to make their own minds, wouldn't it? I tried my best to include what I found relevant about the original situation, and IIRC I added a couple years ago the explanations about the FSF and Jonathan Corbet analysis of the fork.

If there are other links from the parties involved, or from uninvolved independent third parties directly covering the topic, it would be great to have them added to the "Licensing issues" section in a way that satisfies the neutral point of view requirement. Diego (talk) 13:28, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

The FSF does not publish any text that is related to the specific situation in cdrtools and Jonathan Corbet is just a really bad journalist that forwards libel without even asking the other side. Corbet is not a lawyer and he does not quote lawyers, so his claims are "own research" that does not belong to Wikipedia. Note that Wikipedia should only include neutral texts, so we need to remove the text that quotes the FSF and Corbet. There are of course quotes from lawyers available, all of them confirm that cdrtools do not have a legal problem. How about using this for the Wp article? Schily (talk) 17:11, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

The difference is that we *do have references establishing a connection between the CDDL license and the perceived problems to distribute cdrtools with GPL software. What source do we have explicitly connecting cdrtools with trademark law? Diego (talk) 05:22, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure what you like to say here. There are claims in the net from the FSF about CDDL and GPL but these claims have been writen by a layman (Stallman) and Eben Moglen confirmed that these claims are wrong, so these claims are not useful for cdrtools. This is in special as the FSF does not say under what constraints their claims may be correct and as there is absolutely no legal reasoning from the FSF. On the other side, there are legally reasoned statements from various lawyers that there is no problem in cdrtools, but these statements are not in the net.

The citation regarding trademarks is what you removed, so we of course have a legally useful statement here. Schily (talk) 14:57, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Is this one the confirmation from Eben Moglen you talk about? If so, it may be a good addition to insert in the article alongside the FSF claim. (Note though that Moglen affirms that the GPL compatibility of mkisofs was broken at some point, and describes "Jörg's mistaken statement that I somehow indicated that cdrtools is non-infringing"). Wikipedia isn't concerned with which version is the true version; when different parties hold contradicting positions, we simply report all the views which are significant to the topic, in order to present a neutral point of view.

You'll note that I have re-introduced the link to the article in a way that I find somehow acceptable. Now that you don't want it to support an explicit assertion about cdrtools' compatibility with GPL, it was not difficult to do.

Now, if the legal statements from various lawyers are not published, we can't use them for an encyclopedia article that requires verification of its claims, can we?

It's clear that you have an extensive knowledge about the topic, and of the various discussions that happened during the years. It would be best for the article if you provided here in the talk page links to relevant highlights (such as the above statement by Eben Moglen upon Mark Shuttleworth's request), letting other editors use whatever material they deem significant enough for inclusion. Diego (talk) 16:24, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

I have just found the reply to the previous Morgen's description of the conversation, and I have added it to the article as well. Do you have a link to the promised clarification of what happened? Diego (talk) 16:52, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Moglen is a problematic guy. He usually writes correct things in private conversation and incorrect things (motivated by politics) in the public. In this special case, I have a private mail where Moglen confirms no problems in cdrtools and that the web pages from the FSF are wrong. He promised to write a public statement that there is no problem in cdrtools and offered to talk to Stallman and to convince him to fix the FSF web page but he did not succeed and after that, he did what you see. So I am sorry, we cannot use the public statements from Moglen. They are in conflict to what he wrote before and as these public statements contain no legal reasoning, they are worthless anyway. Note that in the previous private conversation, he confirmed that a gtar binary linked to a CDDLd library of course can be legally distributed. Schily (talk) 11:11, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

On the contrary, we can only use the public statements from Moglen, and not private ones. Wikipedia is composed with whatever information has been released; we can't depend upon information that is kept private. Moglen view is relevant to the section because of Shuttleworth's request to the SFLC. If you don't like what Moglen said in publid, too bad - he did it anyway, and it's on the public record now; you can't deny that he sent that post to the Arch Linux mail list through Xavier Chantry, and therefore that one is Moglen's public position. Diego (talk) 14:31, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure whether Moglen knows that in case his false public claims were published at a prominent place, I am forced to disclose the non-public discussion with him that verifies that he is lying. Also note that there was an agreement with him that there will be no public statement on the case except when Moglen writes a legally provable reasoning. So what Moglen did is libel - which is a crime in Europe. Schily (talk) 15:07, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Proposal for a Version of "licensing" that does not include non-neutral claims

The project was originally licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

With version 1.11a17 (released in 2002), a section of cdrtools' source code was modified to include an invariant section, with the intent to prevent people from distributing variants with intentional bugs under the original name. The purpose of this invariant section was to make sure any modification to cdrecord would be properly reported as such to the user. Publishing modified code under another name is still permitted, making the file compatible with the OpenSource definition.

In May 2006, most parts of cdrtools were switched to the CDDL with permission from their authors. After this license change some parts of cdrtools (e.g. mkisofs, which is still GPL-licensed) use code that was switched to CDDL, (e.g. libscg, the SCSI Transport Layer developed by Jörg Schilling).

Several GNU/Linux distributions stopped distributing cdrtools in 2006, claiming that this was related to the license change, but without giving a legally valid justification that the license change introduced a problem.

The author's position is that any open source operating system can distribute cdrtools as long as the terms of the licenses are respected and Eben Moglen confirmed that it is legal to distribute binaries from GPLd programs even if they link against CDDLd libraries. This is needed to make e.g. binary distributions of gtar legal for OpenSolaris.

Debian, Red Hat, and Mandriva have all either dropped cdrtools or reverted to the last non-CDDL release of cdrtools, and have not reverted that decision until now. In August 2008, Mark Shuttleworth offered to ask the Software Freedom Law Center for a legal opinion on whether cdrtools could be included in Ubuntu, provided Schilling agreed to accept the opinion. In December 2009 Shuttleworth claimed that he was no longer willing to follow the rules that have been negotiated for this deal. cdrtools is again included in openSUSE since 2013-Dec-04. As of 26 February 2014, openSUSE continues to distribute the modified version (cdrkit) while secondary packages' dependencies on it are being eliminated.

---

Note that this proposal still misses information that explains what really happened and that it was Debian that started the dispute in Spring 2004. Spring 2004 was when Debian started their fork! This proposal also does not explain that the license change at least partially was a reaction to defend against the attacks from Debian that have been under way since three years at that time. This proposal is however useful as a neutral starter for future enhancements. Schily (talk) 17:50, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Actually, I would prefer to include that information about "what really happened" in Spring 2004, and avoid the mentions to trademark law until we have a source connecting it with cdrtools (can you provide links to online logs of discussions from that era?). The new wording of that particular sentence ("making the file compatible with the OpenSource definition"), although still only supported indirectly, is an improvement though, as it now does not assert that the new license was GPL-compatible. Diego (talk) 05:29, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

The term "GPL compatible" is useless in practice. This is because in practice people do not try mix lines of code from CDDLd sources with lines of code from GPLd sources. What typically happens is to create a so called collective work, where licenses do not need to be as compatibile to permit direct code mixing.

The problem with the wikipedia article in general is that OSS hostile people from the Debian camp frequently add false claims to the article in hope that these false claims would help them to gain space against cdrtools. This is e.g. what need to be known with the "invariant section" claim. This section was added by one of the Debian sockpuppets in order to leave the neutral way. This was done by using two lies:

1. The person used a false date for the introduction (this is what frequently happenes in relation to cdrtools to convince people from lies).
2. The person witholded the truth that the invariant part only applies if the source was modified in an impairing way and the name was not changed at the same time.

What I did in order to defend against that attack was to:

1. Correct the date. BTW: the change was a proposal from Debian to defend against intentionally defective cdrecord variants from Suse since 2001.
2. Add a citation that verifies that no OSS license grants to use the original name for modified variants and that cdrecord even with the invariant section still is true OSS.

I have no problem if the complete section could be permanently removed, but I fear that this is not possible, so I prefer a legally correct wording. This is why I added the citation to the university of washington. Schily (talk) 11:30, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I just noticed that you did already make changes to the article - thank you! Schily (talk) 12:41, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I have two questions with respect to the invariant section:

• Is there a link to the published version of cdrecord.c that first included that invariant? I've tried to find it myself, but the only ones I've found are under GPL or CDDL only without the invariant section (admittedly I didn't try very hard). We should include for verifiability a direct link as a reference, rather than the current snippet posted as a comment in wiki code, which is not visible to readers.
• Where is it implied that the additional requirements ("clearly document", "clearly also inform"...) do not apply if the software is released with a different name? A literal reading of both the snippet and the LIMITATIONS clarification have those obligations stated without any conditional, so logically they would always apply, with or without renaming the released code. Diego (talk) 14:46, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Cdrtools-1.11a17 is still available... the text in question was rewritten several times as it turned out that people missunderstand it. I am in hope that the current text in LIMITATIONS is clear enough. If you believe that LIMITATION should be made even more obvious, feel free to make proposals. Schily (talk) 15:11, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

You have a strange understanding of what these pages are for. I'm not interested in suggesting proposals for improving your software, but in documenting what happened around the license change in 2006 and the later years. My questions were directed at clarifying what the actual text of the license said when the fork happened, not what you intended it to mean. Diego (talk) 22:52, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

You have a strange understanding of what a neutral point of view is. As it seems that we cannot agree on a neutral longer statement, we at least need to remove the offensive and non-neutral claims. Schily (talk) 13:08, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

This is what a neutral point of view is, in respect of Wikipedia. Have you read the Neutrality policy at least once? It doesn't consist in removing offensive claims, but in adding the points of view of every party involved. Diego (talk) 18:20, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

So if you know this rule, why did you remove important text that is needed in order to mark offensive and wrong claims from people who like to harm cdrtools? You removed text that marked this kind of text as a point of view and converted it into a claim that looks like a proven claim to uninformed people. Schily (talk) 11:01, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

You need references by reliable sources to establish what is a relevant point of view. The bits of text I removed were not referenced, or didn't say the same that was said in the references. We already went through this - you cannot point to a third party source to make it say what you want.

If you have in mind some sentences that you want to signal as the point of view from one side, we can work to attribute those parts to the sources that support it; I'm open to rewriting the section as long as the new text can be reasonably interpreted to say the same things as the references. Diego (talk) 16:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

So we need to remove a lot of claims that you might like to keep but that are no reliable sources. Crackerbarrel claims from people like Mr. Corbet do e.g. not belong to WP. Schily (talk) 17:32, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Any reference is reliable for statements about their own opinion; as Corbet's claims are clearly marked as such, not as objective truth as stated in the voice of Wikipedia, they are valid for that purpose. If you have concerns about the references used in the article you can discuss their reliability at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard - but be prepared to find most if not all of the available references challenged there; the people that reviews references there have a much higher standard for reliability than the one used in this article, so it could end with most of the article blanked or even the whole thing deleted. Diego (talk) 18:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Censorship

Hello User:Chire,

Your feedback on this article is not neutral. You say you did not find what you were looking for, but :

• you do not say what you were looking for;
• you say there is too much self-advertisement by Schily in this article just because readers can finaly compare cdrtools with its Debian fork, cdrkit;
• you say this article should be deleted and then restarted, but you know this would destroy all its history.

In your user page you say you are an inclusionist but you removed several distributions from the table in section "Availability of precompiled binary packages" claiming they are not relevant just because these distributions do not have articles in Wikipedia.

The list of GNU/Linux distros shipping cdrtools is perfectly relevant to anyone wishing to make his/her own mind about the availability of cdrtools on independant distributions.

Until now, a few Debian developers have been very successful in convincing the community that cdrtools could not be distributed in GNU/Linux distros, but the existence of so many distros shipping cdrtools is finally convincing more and more users that this is not true.

I'll re-insert the lines you removed. If you're a real inclusionist, please do not sensor my edits again.

Thank you. Ekkt0r (talk) 22:25, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

"no find what you are looking for" was a predefined question that I had to answer as "yes/no"; should I have said "yes"?

As is, the article is not encyclopedic. It serves as a replacement for the useless cdrtools homepage, which is even more full of Schily hate. The whole purpose of this article is to demonstrate why everybody should be using cdrtools, and not the standard software coming with all the major distributions. Give this article to anybody looking for a cd writing software on Linux, and ask him about their opinion. I'd be surprised if you get any other reaction than "WTF, who is supposed to read this?!?".

Currently, the article violates the first pillar of Wikipedia - it's not encyclopedia style. But a good example of: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal.

Also from Wikipedia:NOTEVERYTHING: An encyclopedia article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject. The list of distributions, or an "well, cdrtools has this feature, and the others do not, booya!" just does not belong here at all. If a user is interested in cdrtools, he should just check with his Linux distribution, and not some random list of 10-user distributions that someone once put on Wikipedia and forgot to maintain then.

As is, I did not find what I was looking for. Because you and Schily are turning this page in a replacement homepage of cdrtools, instead of an enyclopedia summary. --Chire (talk) 08:34, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

As you are interested in using Wikipedia to attack an OpenSource project, a correct encyclopedic article will of course never contain "what *you* are looking for".... The rule is to mention one thing only once and not to repeat things as you like, just because you like to harm the project. A hint to the comment in the cdrtools source that you are not allowed to add certain kind of bugs unless you use a different name is in the article in an ecyclopedic correct way - using citationy to point to the code. To not again try to add code snipplets to article, or this must be seen as vandalism. Schily (talk) 11:23, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

We could summarize the invariant section if we had a place where it can be read online in its original form. Do you have a link to an online repository showing the source code of the cdrtools.c file as of version 1.11a17? Diego (talk) 14:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

This summarize already exists n the license section. In contrary to the non-neutral background of the additions from User:Chire, the summarize correctly explains the background. It is non encyclopedian style to additionally fully include a 10 year old random version from somewhere in the middle. Schily (talk) 16:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

The snippet of cdrecord.c

Hi Diego,

When I added the invariant section as a snippet of the cdrecord.c source code, I thought it was a fair use. But having it unhidden is not fair, since Jörg, who is the copyright holder, thinks it should not appear in the article. I dont even know if Jörg would agree to have it just hidden. When I included it as hidden comment, I wanted to allow editors to see it, but knew it was not something that should appear in an article. That's why I think someone should either hide it, or, even better, remove it like I did. Did it myself, since the reference points to a copy of the full invariant section.

Thanks. Ekkt0r (talk) 07:31, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Please see our objectionable content and neutrality policies - we don't remove facts merely because the author disagrees with showing them, and having the text removed or hidden is not fair to readers. The article needs to show how the license differs from the standard CDDL and GPL licenses for readers to make their mind about the license issues. If your concern is about the copyright of a large chunk of text, I will rephrase it to explain in my own words the new distribution restrictions that the license introduced. Diego (talk) 09:01, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Diego, please follow the neutrality and other WP rules.

1. There is no need to include a random version of some text when the first version and the current version are already linked in a WP correct way
2. Cdrtools does not differ from other CDDLd or GPLd software because the quoted text just explains the statutory rules in the law
3. There is a WP correct explanation of what happened in the second paragraph of the "licensing" section that points to version 1.11a17 when the text has been introduced.

A WP article sould inform people instead of giving some people a platform for just throwing mud by adding falsified claims based on things that really happened. Don't allow trolls like Chire to abuse you as a vehicle for their attacks.Schily (talk) 10:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

I'll follow my own judgement as to whether something is relevant for the article, not yours nor Chire's, thank you very much. Any version of the license that was discussed by a major distro and ultimately led them to abandon the original code may be relevant for inclusion; and the several rewrites of the invariant section may be interesting on their own in so far as they were noted by third parties.

In order to be neutral and inform people of relevant issues, the article should contain your views as well as those reactions from other people to what you wrote. And you certainly wrote those versions of the license; if you didn't want them analyzed and discussed, you shouldn't have made available on the internet in the first place, specially not in a project attached to a license for free reuse. I promise to do my best to include just the parts that were ultimately relevant to decisions that affected the project near the time of the fork, but don't expect me allow those parts to simply be dropped from the article. Diego (talk) 11:46, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

So you like to tell us that you prefer mud in the article instead of correct information? Note that you just reverted the correct explanation for the Linux-2.6 problem in favor of a text that only has the goal to harm cdrtools. Schily (talk) 15:22, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

I think Diego did not know the full story at that time. See my message in section "Talk:cdrtools#Edits by Diego Moya". Ekkt0r (talk) 06:24, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Edits by Diego Moya

I am unhappy to see that Diego Moya again removed correct text and replaced it by offensive and false claims in the Licensing section. Schily (talk) 20:52, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, Diego edited the article before my recent edit ("Talk:cdrtools#The true story").

I think Diego honestly wanted to improve the article. The problem is that this is a very difficult task for someone who believes the claims from the anti-cdrtools side. I'm sure Diego has now understood he only had one side of the story. I hope he will restart editing the article and am sure he will help us improve it.

BTW, let me change the name of this section to "Edits by Diego Moya". Ekkt0r (talk) 06:24, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

If Diego did prove the claims he adds before doing so, this would prevent a lot of problems. He currently unfortunately just adds unproven claims from Debian without marking them as unproven claims even though these claims could be proven as definitely false with little effort. The licensing section therefore must be first adjusted to the agreed text that removed all non-neutral claims and the one line information from the SuSE project manager must be added then. If Diego honestly wants to improve the article, he should act different after reading the background of the story. Schily (talk) 09:53, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

As I said, I would love to read the background of the story and include it in the article, but I'm simply unable to do so without references. Additions to the article like this edit of yours are strictly forbidden by no original research policy, and double so in this case because of your conflict of interest. What matters is not what I believe to be true, it's what can be documented to reliable third-party websites (or books!). Debian "unproven claims" are easily verified - i.e. it's undeniable that Debian collaborators made those claims, so they must be documented in the article in some form.

Note how the article carefully doesn't assert that Debian position is proven and true, either; that's left as an exercise to the reader to assess, who is expected to exert their own judgment. This is simply the way Wikipedia articles are written: it's in our manual of style and policies, that have been agreed upon by the community at large. If you don't like this style, you should go elsewhere to publish your version of the story. If you really want the article to accurately reflect your point of view, you need to provide links to external sites where that reflect that narrative; you can't simply add to the article your evaluations as to what The Truth is or is not. If you believe that those claims can be easily proven false, by all means do so by bringing the references here to the talk page, and I will incorporate them to the article if they are valid sources. Diego (talk) 16:56, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

The current licensing section is full of unproven and unacceptable claims that you added. Let us start with the agreed neutral text and you of course need to prove any claim you like to add before you add it. Schily (talk) 17:36, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

The claims don't need to be proven (as long as they are identified as claims made by someone, and are not written as assertions made by Wikipedia itself); they need to be verifiable (as in, any reader can verify that Debian collaborators made those claims), and they are. Please learn and respect Wikipedia policy. Diego (talk) 17:39, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

If they are marked as unproven, I have no problem. Note that since 8 years, debian claims a license conflict that does not exist and nobody has of course been able to verify this claimed license conflict during the past 8 years. So from a legal point of view, the debian claims are no more than libel and slander. BTW: it seems that I need to regret because I confused hostile changes from Chire with changes from you - sorry. Thanks to a hint from Ekkt0r. Schily (talk) 21:55, 6 March 2014 (UTC)