Comment 76 for bug 213215

Unfortunately, Redhat legal does not follow usual rules for legality.

The real problem seems to be that Redhat does not like the CDDL but
does not tell this is the public (I have private statements from
Redhat employees that verify this statement).

Cdrkit is in conflict with the Copyright law and cannot be legally distributed.
Redhat distributes cdrkit ignoring legal background.

Cdrtools however is completely legal and completely following the rules
for all used licenses (including of course the rules of the GPL).

If Redhat employs real lawyers, Redhat is expected to know that
any interpretation of the GPL that is not ignoring the high-order
legal rules from:

1) http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
    otherwise the GPL would not be an accepted free license

2) The US Copyright law

3) The European Copyright law

of course permits the "collective works" used in cdrtools.

See:
http://www.osscc.net/en/gpl.html
http://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm
http://www.osscc.net/pdf/QualipsoA1D113.pdf

Note that the FSF is _very_ eager to define the GPL as a US-license
and not a contract, therefore the GPL is not permitted to redefine
the definition for a "derived work", see

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

and the legal essay from Tomas Gordon mentioned above.

In Europe, the general conditions of business apply to the GPL
and make sure that for all doubtful cases in the GPL the
interpretation that is better for the licensee has to be applied.

It is a commonly accepted truth that linking two independend
works (like a GPLd program and a CDDLd library) just creates
a collective work permitted by the GPL. A derived work is only
if there was a modification of a significant threshold of
originality.

As you see, there are _many_ lawyers that in a legally correct
way explain why there is _no_ problem in cdrtools.

From Redhat legal and from the FSF, there is only FUD but not
a single legally useful statement.

Do you really like us to follow people who just spread FUD?

I understand that you (Roman) get payed from Redhat, so I
do not expect any useful statement from you in the public, but
I hope that you are still able to understand in private that your
employer is an actor in an anti-OSS campaign.

Note that _all_ works in cdrtools (except mkisofs) are pure CDDL
and that the work mkisofs just links against libraries that
are much older than mkisofs and used not only by mkisofs but by
many other programs. So there is doubtlessly a permitted
collective work.

Do we really need to warn people about Redhat's aparent anti OSS goals
or is there a chance that Redhat will act seriously in future?