[gNewSense-users] CD writing support

[Markus Laire]

Hello,
After learning about gNewSense I was pleased to learn that you have
removed all the problematic firmware from the Linux Kernel.

Still, there is another serious problem - CD writing - which I'd like
to discuss.

CD writing in gNewSense seems to be handled by cdrecord, but IMHO it
should be removed from the project ASAP because you don't have a valid
license to distribute it. (In fact, most likely nobody has.)

The problem with cdrecord isn't just the CDDL license. The bigger
problem is that many parts of cdrecord are not licensed under GPL, but
under "GPLv2 + additional restrictions"

Debian bug-report #387783[1] speaks about this problem in cdrkit
(which was recently forked from cdrecord). A short quote from there:
> The current license of cdrkit (which was recently forked from
> cdrecord) seems to be GPLv2 + additional restrictions.
>
> This kind of a license is self-contradictory because on the one hand
> the copyright holder says that no further restrictions (beyond the
> ones found in the GPL terms) can be imposed on recipients (see GPLv2,
> section 6). On the other hand he himself adds such restrictions. As a
> consequence, we probably end up not having a valid license. No license
> implies "All Rights Reserved", that is to say, the package is not only
> non-free, it's undistributable!

This means that anyone who is serious about including only legally
distributable software, can't include cdrecord.

Unfortunately I don't know of any free legally distributable
alternative which would allow cd-writing.

So what is gNewSense going to do? If no free legally distributable
program can be found for cd-writing, will gNewSense include
undistributable or non-free program (like cdrecord, cdrkit or
dvdrtools) - or will gNewSense remove support for cd-writing?

Of course not having a cd-writing support would be quite a problem (No
LiveCD or InstallationCD creation for example), which is exactly why
this is such a serious problem.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=387783

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so there is (at least in theory) a
possibility that the situation isn't as bad as I've depicted in this
message.

--
Markus Laire