Re: [gentoo-user] CD ROM does not play audio CD's

Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 26 June 2008, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > A more general problem is the license incompatibility with libcdio.
> > Sun dropped libcdio already a year ago after Sun lawyers detected the
> > problem and I expect that Linux distros will do the same soon.
>
> Could you elaborate a little on what the license incompatibility is?

First, libcdio had an illegal license change: the "authors" took a lot of the
code from cdrtools and claim that "their" code (e.g. derived from cdda2wav) is 
GPLv2-or-any-later. Well, not a single file from cdda2wav has ever been released
under this license.

If we ignore this, we come to the problem identified by the Sun lawyers:

If you run sound-juicer, then gstreamer (being LGPL) loads and calls libcdio 
which is GPL. This is not allowed by the GPL. GPL and LGPL are incompatible.


While the GPL is asymmetric and allows GPL code to call code under any license,
GPLd code is not allowed to be called from non-GPL code.


The LGPL has a "cure" for this problem but if you try to use it, you even come 
into more problems:

The LGPL allows you to change your local copy of code from LGPL to GPL, but this
change is irreversible and valid to your local copy and all copies taken from 
this code. If you did do the change, you would end up in a bunch of GPL 
libraries that cannot be used anymore by non-GPL code, making your distro 
unusable.




Jörg

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