Star & FreeBSD

[Joerg Schilling]

Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd at online.fr> wrote:

> You are, of course, the author of excellent tools like cdrecord,
> which many people use on FreeBSD too, so I have no doubt star is
> very good software.  However, you also have a reputation of not
> working well with Linux kernel developers or distribution
> packagers, to the point of once inserting a clause (in
> violation of the GPL) targetting SuSE, and also of refusing to
> integrate others' patches offering useful functionality (like DVD
> burning)[1].  So base system could mean trouble.  Even today, there
> are few good alternatives to cdrecord in linux-land, so you can get
> away with some "attitude" there, but star is a different matter.
>
> Rahul
>
> [1] See eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/97469/

You should not believe people who are known not to cooperate....

It seems that yoy are a victim of Linux FUD :-(

But reading your text makes me believe that you could also be an
active member of the Linux FUD network.

-	Not I am unwilling to cooperate but SuSE and RedHat do not
	cooperate. It is a fact that both do not contact me when they
	create their mostly useless patches.

-	What I did with cdrecord was a reaction of a severe violation
	of the GPL by SuSE. I did try to contact the product manager
	from SuSE and this person did send me a reply that is pure
	derision. I replied him that I like the violation needs to 
	be  stopped and I did even wait more than one year to give
	SuSE a chance to fix their behavior. After 2 new SuSE
	releases have been published I started to search for a
	way to stop them. ... and it seems that this way did work!

-	I do not refuse to integrate useful and correct code. I however
	tell people who send useless or buggy code what they need
	to change in order to get it integrated. 

	-	The official cdrecord source includes working
		DVD support since March 1988, there is no need
		to add broken DVD code that even breaks the CD writing
		part of cdrecord because it ignores the purpose
		of cdrecord's data structures.

	-	After I finally did get into contact with SuSE again,
		nearly all patches to cdrecord have been removed. They
		only keep a patch that is related to a SuSE proprietary
		change to Linux and that causes more security risks than
		it pretends to fix.

		The other patches from SuSE all have been a result of
		missing knowledge on cdrtools or - even worse - C programming,
		they have been removed.

	-	RedHat only patches because they did introduce incompatible
		changes to Linux and because they do not like to fix
		10 lines of code in the "Silo" bootloader they use for
		Sparc. Note that mkisofs includes support for Sparc 
		boot at least as long as this useless silo patch exists.
		Unfortunately Silo does not follow the sparc boot guidelines.
		It is childish, to maintain a 18 KB "patch" for mkisofs
		instead of fixing Silo. Also note: the basic rule for
		all cdrtools code is that it is portable to 30 platforms.
		The RedHat Silo patch does not even work on Linux/x86.
		The Sparc boot support that _is_ in mkisofs allows
		you to create Sparc boot CDs on any of the 30 supported
		platforms.

	-	There is absolutely no need to patch cdrtools.
		Before SuSE did remove their useless patches, I received
		many mails from people that did complain that cdrecord
		was not working at all. After they compiled an unmodified
		version of cdrtools, it worked! 


The article from lwn is full of lies and you don't really want to use it 
as a proof.....

Note that my impression with FreeBSD is that FreeBSD is not maintained
in a lor of the manor way as Linux is.

In the past I did have nice discussions with FreeBSD people and I hope this
will continue. I am however sorry that it makes no sense to me to talk to
blindfolded people like you.


Jörg

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