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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5

Removed comments

As announced, I'm removing all the unreferenced comments at the Timeline of disagreement section. I'm posting them here for your convenience; if you want some of these assertions to be included in the article for balance, you know what to do: provide the url to a reliable page that asserts the claim in relation to cdrtools, and we'll assess the reliability and relevance of the source for its eventual inclusion. I'll try to rewrite the part about static linking, providing a more accurate description of the Determan reference, as it's a major contention point. Diego (talk) 12:42, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

As mentioned in another place already: your edits removed corrections for claims that are either false, biased or have no relevance for a cdrtools WP article. This removal made the article biased and some claims are even completely incorrect. If you like to keep parts of the left over text, you will need to correct biased claims and to verify other claims, so you know what you have to do... Schily (talk) 13:34, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
As mentioned in another place, what is "biased" or not is determined by the references available. If you want to balance the verifiable assertions included in the article, YOU know what you have to do. Diego (talk) 13:51, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
As mentioned already, in case you do not correct the claims that are now biased or even false, I will have to remove the remaining text in order to prevent the cdrtools article from being biased or wrong. A false claim that is "verified" by another false claim from an unreliable source is no more than a false claim. If you like to keep that false claim, you may like to tag the false claim as what it is: a false claim. Schily (talk) 14:02, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
Do that, and you'll be banned in less time that it takes to say WP:NOTTRUTH. If those claims are indeed inaccurate, it shouldn't be hard for you to find someone writing about what happened around the history of cdrtools and its growing pains - there's a full internet there of people talking in the open about free software projects. Any page from distributions' mailing lists, Linux/BSD magazines, blog posts from high-profile participants of those projects or even your own comments in your web page as testament of your position would help, as we already accept those for the article. If after all this time you've been unable to find any URL talking about the licensing disagreements, colour me skeptic that your opinion about the issues described in this page has any accuracy. Diego (talk) 15:03, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
So in other words: you like to tell us that your intention is to have a biased cdrtools article?
I did already add comments to the false and biased claims in order to make then less imbalanced by you removed the comments and this way cause the article to become biased again.
BTW: you seem to missunderstand Wikipedia here... I don't need to verify that your claims are false, but you need to verify that your claims are correct if you like to keep them. So please follow the WP rules. Schily (talk) 15:13, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
Please read my words, because you have a serious misunderstanding of how Verifiability (or any other Wikipedia rule) works: your comments in the article are unacceptable. If you want to publish your comments, do it at your own blog, and we'll decide if we want to link or summarize them. Diego (talk) 15:20, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
Please read my text, you seem to have a serious missunderstanding on how Wikipedia works. If you like to add claims to an article, you need to prove the claims and what you did recently was to modify a text in a way that made it unbalanced or false but you did not add any prove for the claim and the text has either no prove or the existing pointers are pointers to unreliablke sources. As you removed correcting text, you now operate as the supporter of unbalanced or false claims and you either have to give reliable sources or remove the claims. Schily (talk) 15:26, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
The claims in the licensing section correctly represent what the references say (except for the Determan article which could be improved, which as I said I will do when I have time to read it with calm), and I consider them reliable for the purpose for which they're used - namely, to document the position of those making each claim. If you want to challenge the reliability of the sources available, you're free to do so. But all the sources in the article are of the same kind, so if those are not considered reliable, there would be nothing to support the notability of the article. Diego (talk) 15:39, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
You are of course free to add false claims from other people in case they are notable for the article (Mr. Corbet e.g. does not match this and the FSF claim is unrelated to the cdrtools project) and in case that you add a hint that the claims are wrong.
Wikipedia is not a platform for people to spread false claims, so if you believe that people need to know that e.g. Debian made a false claim, you may add it in case you also add a note that the claim made by Debian is false. If you don't, this cannot be called an encyclopedic article anymore. Schily (talk) 16:02, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
A simple question, that you may or may not be able to answer: how do I verify that the claim made by Debian is false? Diego (talk) 16:36, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
Debian is the attacker, so Debian would need to verify their claims. They however never did prove this, so their claims (made while starting an attack) are obviously wrong. BTW: This is exactly how things would work in a court case. Schily (talk) 16:55, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
Is this your answer to a request for verifiable sources? If so, I'm done trying to reason with you. Experience of life, indeed. Diego (talk) 16:50, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Why should we be concerned with what Debian can verify (we are concerned with what our readers can verify), nor what would happen at a court case? Wikipedia is not a court. We have our own set of rules to make decisions, we don't fulfill the expectations of a different place. If you're not willing to abide to the rules of this particular community, you're wasting everybody's time. Diego (talk) 22:13, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Comments

* After this license change some parts of cdrtools (e.g. <tt>mkisofs</tt>, which is still GPL-licensed) use code that was switched to CDDL, (e.g. <tt>libscg</tt>, the [[SCSI]] Transport Layer developed by Jörg Schilling).{{efn|This claim is unimportant as the "work" mkisofs is 100% under GPL.}}

* According to the [[Free Software Foundation]], the CDDL is compatible with the OpenSource definition of free software, but [[License compatibility|incompatible]] with the [[GNU General Public License]] (GPL).<ref name="fsf">{{cite web|url=http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses|title=Various Licenses and Comments About Them - Common Development and Distribution License|publisher=Free Software Foundation|accessdate=2006-12-31}}</ref>{{efn|This claim is unrelated to cdrtools as in cdrtools there is no license mix within a "work".}} Jonathan Corbet, founder of the [[LWN.net]] news source argued this makes it impossible to legally distribute cdrtools binaries.<ref name=Corbet>{{cite web | url = http://lwn.net/Articles/195167/ | author = Jonathan Corbet | title = cdrtools - a tale of two licenses | work=[[LWN.net]] | publisher=[[LWN.net]] | date=2006-08-12 | accessdate = 2007-08-04 }}</ref>{{efn|Corbet just repeats false claims from Debian and is unable to verify a problem in cdrtools.}}

* On 31 Jan 2006, Debian had opened a bug over this license change when noticing the change in the previous version 2.01.01a03 <ref name=debianbug>{{cite web|title=RM: cdrtools -- RoM: non-free, license problems|url=https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=377109|publisher=Debian Bug report logs}}</ref>{{efn|In January 2006, cdtrtools have been 100% GPL, so a license problem as claimed by Debian did not exist.}}

* Just before dropping cdrtools in 2006, the Debian project created [[cdrkit]], a fork of cdrtools.{{efn|Debian stopped distributing the original code in May 2004 or even before and created a fork that introduced many bugs. This fork from Debian was later in 2006 renamed to cdrkit.}}

* Corbet disagreed with Jörg, and stated that the GPL only requires printing of an "appropriate" copyright notice, but do not require to use the exact text provided by the original author and this warning may therefore be replaced with a neutral copyright attribution.<ref name="Corbet2" /><ref>Corbet ignores that besides the Copyright, there is Trademark law that forbids to use the original name of a program in case that there are changes that are above the bug fix level</ref><ref>Corbet also ignores the German Copyright law that allows to enforce specific Copyright comments</ref>


  • These versions all have been derived from the Mandrake version that was created by looking at the cdrecord -V output with a Poioneer DVD-R A03 connected. They missed important code parts, e.g. to adapt to the media size or to print other media information. Often these patches were not maintained for a long time, but they were eventually (around 2003) integrated in what later became cdrkit.
Please do not start an edit war. These statemements are verifyable correct! You can verify the missing features by checking the code and at that time, there was no public information on how to write a DVD, so the only way to get the information was to look at the cdrecord -V output. So please explain me why you believe that you may add unreferenced biased claims to the cdrtools article but do not give others the right to add correct unbiased statements? Schily (talk) 12:35, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

About the discussion style on this page

I am getting the impression that we have several people here that don't like the cdrtools article to become correct. We need to first have a discussion that comes to an agreement before editing the main article. The recent edits have been done without such an agreement and mostly cannot be called neutral.

Please keep in mind that we still have not a single reliable source that confirms a licensing problem in cdrtools.

On the other side, we have the confirmation from:

  • Sun legal made a full legal review of the cdrtools sources and confirmed in August 2008 that there is no legal problem. Result: Sun decided to distribute cdrtools.
  • Oracle legal made a full legal review in Spring 2010 (using different rules) and decided to continue to distribute cdrtools.
  • Suse legal made a full legal review in December 2013 and confirmed that there is no legal problem by distributing cdrtools.

As Debian started to spread their false claims 9 years ago and as there are still no confirmations for their claims, the experience of life should tell you that there will never be a confirmation for a license problem in cdrtools just because it does not exist.

If you like to add or keep claims that say something like "there is a legal problem with cdrtools", you will either need to mark them as verifiable wrong or you need to either present us a reliable source that gives a tracable legal reasoning for this claim or present something that is at least equivalent to the indication that Sun (did before being aquired by Oracle), Oracle and SuSe do distribute cdrtools. Note: claiming we are in fear of distributing cdrtools is not an equivalent indice.

Conclusion: The claims from Debian are verifyable wrong and need to be marked as such.

For the rest (see the section header) I hope that people will not continue to make biased edits on the article, in special as we decided to first come to a conclusion before editing the article in order to avoid future edit wars. Schily (talk) 16:43, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not confirm or reject any claim. It is not supposed to. We do not have WP:The Truth - nobody knows, nobody is objective.
We only document that A says a, B says b without judgement of who is "proven right" or "proven wrong". This is none of our business; that is what courts are for. And even if a court decides who is right, then we only document that "court C said 'A is right'", and only if we have appropriate sources. Please, read: WP:Verifiability, not truth. For Wikipedia, there can be multiple truths (significant views). By adding your footnotes to every statement, you violate this principle: your footnotes need to go in the sentence documenting your personal truth. If you read the article carefully, it is written in the "A says a, B says b, C did c" style, all of which are facts that do not need your opinion attached to them.
The existence of these positions is what we verify; not the correctness. Adding a footnote "Schily disagrees" to every sentence does not help the article; the whole section is about this disagreement. --Chire (talk) 17:48, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
  • If I understand your text correctly, you just confirmed that you missunderstand how Wikipedia works if you believe that I need to do something.
  • You removed comments that are needed in order to have a balanced article. By doing this, you created a new unbalanced statement and as you created this unbalanced statement, it is your task to verify this (your) just created statement. In other words: I am waiting for you to verify your claims. Please note that you made your edits 11 days ago and since 11days, we have an unbalanced article and your claims are waiting for you to be verified or tagged as verifyable wrong claims.
  • Note that in case you do not verify your claims soon, it is obvious that your claims are at least unverifyable which is close to verifyable wrong. As mentioned yesterday on your talk page: A claim that is made by intentionally leaving out important information is a verifable false claim and it was you that removed important information.
  • If you continue to make unbalanced edits, you verify that you have a conflict of interest. So either make balanced statements or stop editing the cdrtools article and related articles. Schily (talk) 09:56, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
See WP:BURDEN. The onus to find references is on the editor who wants to include content (your comments), not the one who wants to remove it (me). The affected sentences currently in the section are all referenced, which for Wikipedia is synonymous with verifiable. Diego (talk) 11:01, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
The comments you removed have been in there for a longer time and if you did disagree, it was your task to mention this on the talk page at the time these correcting comments have been added. You did not do this, so you current edit can be seen as an independent edit with the goal to introduce unbalanced claims. The unbalanced claims you created are partly "verified" by unreliable sources and it is your task to deliver reliable sources. Schily (talk) 11:11, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
What is unreliable in those sources? Diego (talk) 11:14, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
I hope we are not going in circles....
If you were an unbiased person, I would expect that you are interested in making the article unbiased. Could you please explain why you seem to insist in creating a biased article to the detriment of the cdrtools project?
With respect to unreliable sources: every source has its specific problems.
  • Mr. Corbet is e.g. a layman that claims to be a journalist. But if he was a journalist, his duty would be to inform himself from both parties of a dispute. Mr. Corbet however only asked the party that caused the dispute by spreading false claims (Debian) and Mr. Corbet does not give a legally provable reasoning for the (kown to be false) claims from Debian. So I see no difference from quoting John Doe instead - in other words Corbet has no relevance to wikipedia as he just repeats a false claim from the initiator of the dispute. A reliable source would be an independent person that gives a valid provable legal reasoning that supports the claims from Debian, but such independent persons do not exist.
  • The FSF is not a reliable source as the quoted claims belong to something that does not apply in cdrtools: The claims from the FSF are only partially valid for a direct license mix within a single "work", but there is no license mix within a single "work" in cdrtools.
  • I could of course give explanations for the other biased or false claims, but I first like to see that you are willing to understand that the article cannot be kept in it's current biased state.
Please explain me why you are interested in making the cdrtools article biased. Schily (talk) 11:45, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

We have been going around in circles for weeks, there's nothing new there. :-P It would help if you acknowledged from time to time what I say about verifiability, or what the guidelines say.

I don't have any interest at all to make the article biased, but I have no evidence at all that it is biased; although I have repeatedly asked you for proof that there are incorrect claims in the article, you gave me none. If you provided hard evidence instead of ramblings, I would gladly correct anything that could be proved wrong - not by your words, but by other peoples words. It's not my fault if the Internet disagrees with your position.

As for the particular concerns against these sources, we have already discussed all them:

  • Corbet is independent from both Debian and you, and regularly publishes at LWN.net, a specialized Linux magazine that I consider a reliable source about open source software; I haven't seen anything that would make me doubt about its reliability. If other editors would agree with you, I think it could be removed; but note that Corbet's article is included only to document Corbet's position, not to state as fact that Debian was right; and any source is reliable for their own opinions. If you have references stating different opinions, such as the analysis from lawyers about the legality of cdrtools, please bring them here and we will include them for neutrality (the reference to Lothar Determann has been included even if there isn't any direct link to Debian or cdrtools).
  • The FSF has not been included to state any legal conclusion in the article, so again there's no false claim there. It has been included just because Debian developers mentioned it as the reason why they were removing cdrtools and adopting the fork. As any reader can verify that Debian made those claims, and the article in any way states that this is the Truth but merely Debian's position, again the source is reliable for the words included in the article.

So, in summary: I don't think that the sources are unreliable not that the article is biased, and Chire above agrees with me in this. This is based on the evidence I've seen so far, though some solid evidence may convince me. I have no hard feelings about the software, and started to edit here precisely because I was interested in why it was not properly packaged - I actually replaced once cdrkit with cdrtools in my computer to make it work better, but the installation difficulties weren't worth the effort. That you accuse me of bad faith and willing to harm the project, of breaching Wikipedia policy, or make grand claims about the eeeevilnes of Debian developers won't change my mind; if you instead provide physical, hard evidence of what happened in the history of cdrtools, you might convince me and the other editors. It's up to you to decide which approach you want to pursue. Diego (talk) 13:20, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, as your edits are a row of correct unbiased edits and biased edits, I am willing to believe that your biased edits are not made intentionally. The biased edits still give the impression of COI at your side. It may be however that you are a victim of the Debian propaganda that resulted in many copies of the Debian claims all over the net. These claims are still no more than copies from a single source and thus do not help to get a reliable independent source.
If you really have no interest in biased claims, it would be simple for you to avoid unintentionally false or biased claims if you did first present your planned edit on the talk page. If you don't do this which larger parts but for smaller sniplets only, I will happily explain you whether your planned edit can be seen as neutral or as biased. If we work this way, there would be no need for me to make article edits myself and you could even control the wording. You would only have to use a wording that is acceptable.
The problem with the current state of the article is that is is biased and the licensing section is full of false or biased claims that we need to get rid of first. I propose that I remove everything that cannot be seen as unbiased first and we then start to add new text that can be written by other people and added after approval.
  • Corbet may be independent, but he is not neutral as he did never ask me and he manages a pay site that caused me to see discussions based on text I could not see because of a paywall. If he was a journalist that follows the rules of journalism, he did ask me for a comment on what happened from my view but he preferred to forward the claims from the attacking party. This is really bad style. Note that Corbet is not a lawyer and that Corbet did not write a legally valid and provable reasoning. As Corbet is unrelated to the project, he can be seen with the same relevance for cdrtools as John Doe...
  • Determan is the most trustworthy legal source as he is a professor of law in Berlin and San Francisco. He even wrote a paper with plenty of legal reasoning included. Another relibale source that proves Debian wrong are the lawyers from Harald Welte that are definitely pro GPL and that published a GPL book in March 2005 that also proves the claims from Debian wrong, e.g. by confirming that the Debian claim from April 2005 "the scripts to compile the code" have to be under GPL is a false claim. If you like to understand that none of the Debian claims is valid, this may cause a lot of work at your side, but if you are not willing to spend that time, you cannot make unbiased edits.
  • The claims from the FSF may not be false (Moglen on the other side explained that these claims are false because they are based on a false reasoning on why BSD code may be mixed with GPL code), so at least Moglen believes that the claims from the FSF are wrong. As mentioned, the real problem with the FSF text as a "reference" is that this text is not related to what it is tagged to in the article. So in case this text is referenced, there is a must to mention that the text has no relevance to cdrtools.
A source (seen independent from a claim) may be reliable, if it is used with no valid relation to a claim from another person, this source is still not a reliable proof for the claim in question. If you like to be seen as a person with no COI with respect to cdrtools, you need to understand this. Schily (talk) 14:11, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

I thought it would be useful to include the Cdrtools logo in the article. As I couldn't find a license for it, I emailed the author (taken from the comments in http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/logos/logos.html) for permission in VRTS ticket # 2014042510015305. LFaraone 17:35, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Rules for editing the cdrtools main article

When discussing the recent conflicts, we made an agreement that edits on the article should be first discussed on the talk page. Unfortunately not all people follow this rule. In special, Diego did recently make edits with a high conflict potential even though there was a related discussion at the talk page at the same time. I encourage all people to follow the rule to first discuss planned edits on the talk page. Note that recently the following users did make edits with conflict potential: Diego, Chire, Tzafrir and LFaraone. Rules only make sense if all people follow them, so please avoid conflicts and first discuss planned edits on the talk page. Schily (talk) 13:13, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

No, we made an agreement that your edits should be first discussed - you have to understand that you're in a special position with respect to this topic, so the rules are not symmetric. WP:COI applies to you in a way that it doesn't apply to the rest, because we don't have a direct relation with cdrtools (ok, I used it once, but you know what I mean), and you do. I have reported you at Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Cdrtools, you may want to show up there. Diego (talk) 13:25, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
The last conflict was caused by User:Chire and this user definitely has a COI because he initiated a phalanx of biased claims. So it is obvious that User:Chire is not allowed to make edits on the cdrtools article. Unfortunately, WP disallows to name people on WP that attack people/projects and thus supports attackers more than attacked people, if you give me your email address, I can send you a list of known recent attacks against the cdrtools project and me, maybe this help you to understand what is going on.... If we like to do collaborative work, it seems to be the best idea if all people would follow the same rules. So please follow our rules and do not make edits on the article that have not been approved before. This will of course also help to identify non-collaborative people. Schily (talk) 13:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
WP:BRD is the appropriate process in absence of other obvious consensus, modulo content in violation of BLP. LFaraone 17:37, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
LFaraone, I think your recent edits (removal of section "Compatible operating systems" + removal of section "Availability" + removal of a link to section "Compatible operating systems" in the infobox) did not improve the article at all. You removed 2 whole sections without any consensus and without any prior discussion in the talk page. This is censorship, as these sections do contain valuable information that is perfectly relevant on Wikipedia.
WP:BRD says that edits should be discussed. It also says that edits may be reverted if they do not improve the article. I will restore them. These sections are much more encyclopædic than those about the licensing issues. However, I did not remove them because there is no consensus for their removal. So please do not remove sections when there is no consensus. Thank you. Ekkt0r (talk) 09:38, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
Ekkt0r, BRD can get hung on the D stage. Specifically above (in section #Distribution Derivatives) you failed to give a proper argument on why the section is needed and keep discussing the minor details of the table. Others have pointed out that this big table does not conform to the proper article guidelines. Tzafrir (talk) 10:05, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
We all know there are more than one thousand GNU/Linux distros, and that most of them do not distribute cdrtools. Well, this is exactly the reason why the list of operating systems that do distribute cdrtools is a valuable information and is relevant for an encyclopædia. Now, regarding the inclusion of some popular distros that do not ship cdrtools, these lines are also very important because users seeking information about cdrtools are very likely to ask themselves which are the major distros that ship or do not ship cdrtools. Providing a list of all distros would be absurd. But providing the list with the "status" about the major distros and the status of those "minor" distros that ship cdrtools is something that many readers of the article care about. Moreover, these tables are not that big, and I have even made them collapsible a long time ago. Regarding the "Compatible operating systems" section, it is both small and perfectly relevant for a cross-platform software suite. On the other side, the sections about the licensing issues are much bigger, do not (currently) bring neutral information and are not so interesting for most users. Did I remove them? No. So please do not try to support censorship. Thank you. Ekkt0r (talk) 10:32, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
As I wrote there, a table does not help understanding. I suggesting summing up the table in a single paragraph. No point adding every Gentoo and Slackware derivative out there. BTW: it's spelled censorship. Given that I give relevant arguments, I wonder why you try to label my edits as censorship. You're also free to provide that information in the official or an unofficial page about cdrtools. Tzafrir (talk) 10:53, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for your tip about my spelling mistake. (I've just fixed all occurences of it). Now, regarding sections "Compatible operating systems" and "Availability", I still think both are relevant. The fact that the information it carries could be put in an external site does not mean it should not be in the article. Regarding the removal (from the table) of those distros that derive from major distros that ship cdrtools, this would remove interesting pointers showing that some distros do not see any problem in distributing cdrtools. There are so few distros shipping cdrtools that I really think the table should not be reduced. I have given up listing Pardus because that distro only ships a 3 year-old alpha release (3.01a04, which was released on 12 April 2011), but all other (green) distros in the table ship more recent releases of cdrtools. These sections are easy to read and/or skip, and the table in the "Availability" section is even collapsible! Once again, the information these sections carry is interesting to anyone wishing to make his/her own idea about cdrtools. After all, this software suite has been available on Debian for nearly 9 years (between 1997 and 2006, when it got kicked out of Debian). Don't you think its notability is big enough? I have the feeling that many Debian developers are affraid of the consequences a greater visibility of cdrtools would have. cdrtools is currently being boycotted by most majour distros --I don't intend to discuss the reasons now. Well, I don't think the article in Wikipedia should contribute to this boycott. Wikipedians are smart people who can select by themselves which sections are worth reading and which are not. Removing these sections would definitely not improve the article. Regarding your suggestion to sum up the table in a single paragraph, we all know that tables are much easier to read, because users can read the header and then quickly scan the lines in the body. Thanks for your understanding. Ekkt0r (talk) 12:46, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

3.01a04 misses the last 19 releases and thus misses a lot of the newer features (like full UDF file type/permission support and root-less Linux support), but it is a modern cdrtools with working DVD and BluRay support, with enhanced UDF support from helios.de, with a built in find(1) in mkisofs and with all the nasty ISO-9660 bugs fixed that cause an incorrect ISO-9660 filesystem structure. So it still delivers aprox. twice as many features than cdrkit. When trying to describe the position of a distro, it may be important to check whether it ever contained a cdrtools version from past May 15 2006 (when the license change happened). Schily (talk) 14:17, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Ekkt0r, we're not here to discuss your speculations. I present sound technical argument and you keep responding with "Debian" coming after cdrtools and trying to boycott and censor you. Pardus was restructured. Old Pardus was based on Gentoo and included thus included cdrtools (no special ebuild of theirs). New Pardus is based on Debian and does not include cdrtools (they did not bother to include it). Old versions of Pardus included it just as old versions of Debian included it. They did not bother remove it as they did not bother add it. They simply don't care. If you claim Pardus provides a binary package of cdrtools, you have false claim. Why do we even have to spend time on claims that are so false and have been demonstrated to be false?
If you claim that cdrtools is boycotted by major distributions, please provide a reference. We're not here to discuss speculations. Otherwise, please provide proper arguments as to why we should have those two tables. Disclaimer: As I mentioned before, I'm a Debian Developer. That said, I have not been involved with packaging cdrtools, cdrkit, libburnia or any related package and I'm not well familiar with any of the people involved. I try to keep to facts. Tzafrir (talk) 15:44, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
I am not sure about what you intend here. If it is about whether there may be a legal reason or whether there is a reason-less boycott, this has been proven already many times before: After Debian was asked to replace a packetizer that is unwilling for cooperation in December 2004, Debian came up with an accusation about a so called license problem with cdrecord caused about a so called license change in cdrecord in April 2005, but a license change did not happen with cdrecord before May 2006 and nobody did ever confirm a license problem with legally valid reasoning. So what do you like to achieve? Having a relation to Debian is no problem as long as you are interested in fact based discussions. Schily (talk) 18:11, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
Debian had a bug open since 2004. There were other licensing issues even before the change of license. The license change may have been the last straw. BTW: this is how you provide a rederence to your claims. Note that the last part ("the last straw") is my personal speculation and is not supported by the reference. Tzafrir (talk) 21:06, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
It is correct that there have been many attacks from Debian in a row against the cdrtools project that finally triggeed the license change on May 15 2006 after it had become obvious that there is nobody to support the correct interpretation of the GPL.
I mentioned a GPL based attack from April 2005, you now come up with a different attack from September 2004. If you like to understand the attack from September 2004, you also just need to understand the background:
  • The comment in cdrtools that is discussed in this "bug" was added to defend against a modified version from Suse that caused dozens of bugreports every day for a long time for a problem that did not exist in the original code.
  • This comment is fully compatible with all OSS licenses as OSS licenses do not give the permission to use the original project name for modified versions. Note that Suse could have used a different name for the related defective Suse variant from that time.
  • This text of that comment was previously negotiated with Debian.
  • The old Debian packetizer from before 2004 (which IIRC is the one that wrote the first mail to the Debian bug tracking system) is a co-author of the mentioned text.
You see, this looks like greetings from absurdistan. Schily (talk) 11:06, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
And you still fail to provide any references. Anyway we're side-tracking here, see the comments below regarding Wikipedia article guidelines. Tzafrir (talk) 19:07, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
You may missunderstand the situation, so let me explain it to you: You presented a pointer to some text with claims. I explained what really happend and (if needed) I am able to verify my statementes in court by disclosing private mails with the related people. So the URL you presented links to baseless accusations. In other words, you linked to external personal attacks which is not allowed by WP, see WP:NPA. Schily (talk) 09:25, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
@Ekkt0r:, you say the removed sections are more encyclopædic than the licensing issues. But yet we see lots of reliable, secondary sources and primary source discussion (e.g. mailing lists) by various people. There does not appear to be similar coverage of which distributions contain the software or have a third-party build available. This article suffers from being on the wrong side of WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:NOTMANUAL. LFaraone 17:18, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
When I say that the "Compatible operating systems" and "Availability" sections are more encyclopædic than sections "License disagreement" and "Timeline of licensing disagreement", I'm not saying that these should be removed. I have even said that I would not remove them. So please do not suggest that I am requesting their removal. I know they will stay there.
Regarding the sources for the table in the "Availability" section, I can add refs for every line if you wish. I haven't done so yet because I think it would only bring noise, as it is obvious that nothing there is invented and that anyone wishing to verify the information can use Google. Moreover, anyone can challenge any line, like Tzafrir did, and see that when I do a good faith edit that someone spots as not 100% correct, I do accept its removal. BTW, you can see that I did not revert Tzafrir's edit about Pardus.
Regarding your last comment, this article does not suffer from being a manual or being not neutral. It suffers from the boycott that was decided by Debian in 2006 against cdrtools. You probably already know that since you declare that you volunteer with Debian and Ubuntu. Ekkt0r (talk) 07:18, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
@Ekkt0r: as far as I can tell there is a wide consensus that complete download and platform support lists are not of encyclopedic relevance. In my opinion, it is implied by Wikipedia policy WP:NOTMANUAL 38.123.136.254 (talk) 02:34, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
I'm sorry, 38.123.136.254, there is no consensus at all. The only thing we can say is that several editors have a big interest in maintaining a boycott of cdrtools and censoring this article. BTW, you give your opinion with an IP-based edit, so it makes it difficult to give you any credit. Moreover, the 4 edits from 38.123.136.254, which seem to come from a single user:
make me think you might be happy that most Linux users are forced to use defective forks that produce coasters (on some hardware) while the original software works on all (or nearly all) hardware. You also claim (in the third edit listed above) that you are starting to believe that it would be a good idea to delete the cdrtools article. Isn't this the most convincing proof that you have a COI and that your opinion on a claimed consensus is simply not neutral? Kind regards. Ekkt0r (talk) 07:42, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
It seems we are stuck, then. How about a third opinion (regarding those two sections - to keep things focused)? Tzafrir (talk) 10:42, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
@Ekkt0r:, ping. Tzafrir (talk) 18:05, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
Hi Tzafrir, I guess you saw that I have reconsidered this edit by 94.216.78.182 and finally removed the "red only" lines from the table in the "Availability" section. Now that this section reports facts in a more neutral way (i.e. without focussing on Debian anymore), there should be no problem keeping the table, as explained in WP:PROMOTION#Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion, which says that "an article can report objectively about such things, as long as an attempt is made to describe the topic from a neutral point of view". The same rule applies to section "Compatible operating systems", so there is no more reasons for removing these 2 sections. Thanks. Ekkt0r (talk) 22:27, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
For the record, those two sections are not the only problems I have with the article, and the guidelines you mentioned above help describe it. But for now I want to focus on those two sections. I claim that the big table does a disservice to the reader (see above. No point in repeating it). You disagree. We're in a stalemate. Do you want a third opinion? Tzafrir (talk) 06:43, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
@Ekkt0r:, ping. Tzafrir (talk) 06:36, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I think that the table in the "Availability" section is not too long and that it does serve the article because the information given there is perfectly relevant, as many readers are very likely to be interested in the list of operating systems shipping cdrtools, since that list is negligible compared to the total number of GNU/Linux distributions. Moreover, the information given in that table is neutral and does not break any Wikipedia rule. Finally, the table is collapsible and easy to read and skip. So if you really think it should be removed please provide better arguments as well as pointers to Wikipedia rules that forbid such information. Thank you. Ekkt0r (talk) 08:32, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
I agree with Tzafrir: I do not think we are anywhere close to a consensus. I have said a number of times that in my opinion "Compatible operating systems", "Availability", "Examples of use", and maybe even "Version history" (except for major milestones, such as license change, DVD, BD) should be dropped from the article because of WP:NOTMANUAL. I do think we should get a fifth/sixth/seventh opinion (there are already 5+ editors involved). From the documentation, a WP:3O is therefore not the appropriate process, but we need to go for Wikipedia:Requests for comment. --Chire (talk) 08:01, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
Section "Examples of use" is not a manual. It only gives examples of basic uses. BTW, the cdda2wav is not even there (relax, I won't add that one). Many articles have similar sections. Some even provide complete descriptions for all commands and options. So you cannot claim that this article is a manual. I am open to all discussions about changing and/or removing contents in this article. But if you can't provide strong arguments and pointers to Wikipedia rules that this article would break (according to you), then removing sections just because several editors think they should not be there would just be censorship. Ekkt0r (talk) 09:03, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
@Ekkt0r:, Clearly there's no consensus and we're not getting closer to building one. Do you have any better suggestion than RfC process? If so, please suggest it. I'll start formulating a description of the issue below. Tzafrir (talk) 13:49, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
The problems in this article are not where you seem to expect them.... The problems are rather in the licensing part that is full of own research, pointers to external attacks and claims that are not verified by reliable sources. So there is a lot of text that violates the WP rules. These problematic parts have been added by hostile people and need to be removed. Schily (talk) 14:08, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
We have many disagreements. I want to start with one of less complicated ones so we can see how processes like the RfC work. I generally just want to move forward a bit and break the stalemate. Tzafrir (talk) 14:32, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
I believe it makes more sense to start with the worst parts of the article and the worst arts are doubtlessly in the licensing section. Schily (talk) 15:55, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Recent false claim by Chire

I am disappointed to see that User:Chire again tries to introduce a false claim into the cdrtools article. As verified many times before already, the claims about CDDL vs. GPL from the FSF are unrelated to cdrtools as there is no license mix in cdrtools. The statements from the FSF however only apply to a license mix. Chire, I urge you to revert your edit immediately as it is not compatible with Wikipedia rules, See "own research".

...Well, we should completely remove the sentence with Corbet as the WP rules do not allow WP to point to externap personal attacks. Schily (talk) 13:21, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Read the reference given on that sentence: [1]. It is easy to see (first paragraph) that he references the FSF statement on general CDDL vs. GPL incompatibility. This does not need to align with your interpretation that there is no license mix. Your opinion is a separate bullet point! This sentence must only reflect the LWN source; which does refer to the FSF. --Chire (talk) 14:05, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
Oh, and I doubt that this LWN.net article qualifies as "personal attack"; it is reporting rather non-emotional on the background of an undoubted fact: the license disagreement. I'm not even sure that Mr. Corbet says the cdrecord license is invalid; as far as I can tell he only says there is doubt (which, undoubtedly, is correct) because of the given reasons. There is only half a sentence that one could consider an "attack" on you, which is "[...] conversations with Mr. Schilling have not come to any sort of productive outcome - though it has yielded an amusing nine-point plan from Mr. Schilling [...]" [2]. But I have to admit, I have given up of teaching you that Wikipedia should report "who said what", not WP:The Truth, because there is no truth, only interpretations. In this case: "Corbet says, the FSF statement might apply to cdrtools" (which is something different than "Corbet and the FSF say, this statement does apply" - which you seem to read, despite it not being written in the article!) --Chire (talk) 14:19, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
A personal attack is when someone makes false claims about another person. This is exactly what Mr. Corbet does as his claims are in conflict with all public statements from lawyers about cdrtools.
But I have no problem if the article says that Mr. Corbet claims that ... applies but that is not true. Unfortunately, this is not the current text in the article. Schily (talk) 14:30, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
"claims about another person", but his claims are about a software, not a person. Aren't they? Also "public statements from lawyers about cdrtools": I'd like to see references. So far, I have only seen e.g. books about the GPL, but not lawyers about cdrtools specifically... You may actually want to reread the sentence in the article, it starts with: "Jonathan Corbet, founder of the LWN.net news source argued ..."! How could we make this more clear as being Mr. Corbet's statement?!? --Chire (talk) 14:55, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
Corbet is no more than an average layman and I have no problem if the reference to the FSF is removed. Now that this reference is there, it creates a compsite false claim as it causes the false impression that the statements from the FSF have relevance to the cdrtools. Given the fact, that the FSF only makes a statement about a license mix CDDL/GPL within a single "work" but such a license mix does not exist in cdrtools, naming the FSF in this context is a definite false claim. Schily (talk) 15:07, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
You are avoiding my question about WP:Reliable sources for the lawyers by picking on Corbet instead! The reference to the FSF statement is supported by the reference. Corbet does mention the FSF statement, doesn't he? There is no "wrong impression" here; this is all supported by the source. --Chire (talk) 15:27, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for mentioning WP:Reliable sources, so please give us a reliable source that there is a license problem in cdrtools. If you can't, all related text that is not marked as unreliable is in conflict with the WP rules ( - it can even be seen as a personal attack, as such text harms the cdrtools project and it's authors in person) and the part related to Corbet is not marked correctly in the article. Schily (talk) 15:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
I neither claim there is a problem or not... My claim is that Mr. Corbet says ..., which is supported by the reference that is in the article, as per WP:NPOV#Attributing and specifying biased statements. Do you deny that Mr. Corbet in the given article mentions the FSF and cdrecord? ... But we are running in circles, as you don't seem to understand this difference. --Chire (talk) 15:58, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Schily, if you read carefully, you'll notice that the article never says that there is a license problem in cdrtools; therefore we don't need a reliable source for that claim, as we don't make it. What the article says is that there was a controversy about license, and all the sentences reporting this controversy are referenced. This is how articles are expected to be written to achieve a neutral point of view, and this is how we like them. Diego (talk) 15:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
The problem is that the current text creates a an own research statement that is made by combining the claims from Corbet and the FSF while not mentioning that there is no relation between these two claims. The claim from the FSF does not verify the claim from Corbet, but the wording that was used in the article creates this false impression, so either remove the relation to the FSF or explain that the claim from the FSF does not verify the claim from Corbet. Schily (talk) 16:24, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
As you seem to endorse that there is no license problem problem with cdrtools, how about writing a small subsection about this fact in the beginning of the licensing section and an introduction about the fact that the rest of the licensing section contains just opinions of laymen that are not supported by lawyers? This would make things easier as there then would be no need to fine tune very sentence against possible interpretations that could make people believe there is any truth in the assertions of the various people. Schily (talk) 12:22, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
I haven't concluded or endorsed such a thing; I've stated that "the article doesn't say that there's a problem". The difference may be subtle, but it's important. If you want to create such introduction, you will have to provide references to reliable external sites that explicitly take that position, as always. You may also want to check the Disclaimers links at the bottom; it leads to the General, content and legal disclaimers, which inform the readers about the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy that more or less explains what you want (i.e. that Wikipedia articles are built from the respective points of view of sources making statements about the topic).
When there are disagreements about an article's content, we usually prefer to tweak the wording until all editors are reasonably satisfied, rather than make wide disclaimers and notes of our own. I've refined that sentence to make it clear the Corbet is reporting on what Debian developers expressed in their mailing list. Diego (talk) 12:53, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
As mentioned, it may be hard to make all sentences in the licensing section balanced. We on the other side know that there is not a single credible statement from a legal professional that confirms a problem with cdrtools. So all all claims that talk about so called legal problems are unsourced. In other words, the current wording of the article in in conflict with the WP rules and needs to be fixed on order to become balanced. I made a proposal and I encourage you to make your own proposal if you like. We then change the article to the agreed variant Schily (talk) 13:44, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

@Schily: If you provide a WP:Reliable source that there is no licensing problem, then we can add this. Until then, the following sentence (which has been in already) is appropriate per WP:NPOV: Jörg Schilling denies a license problem in cdrtools. This is very explicit, isn't it? What else do you want? Any other sourced opinion we missed? --Chire (talk) 14:26, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

You seem to missunderstand how things work. You claim that there is a problem, so you need tp provide a reliable source that verifies your claim. As you are obviously unable to verify your claim, your claim is proven false. Schily (talk) 14:37, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
No, I don't claim that (nor do I reject that). My claim is Mr. Corbet says ..., and give a WP:Reliable Source for Mr. Corbet saying so. I also claim there is a disagreement over the licensing situation (which is also obvious from the cited sources); I'm not claiming who is right, so I don't need to provide for that (and I don't know any source for either position; your claim is as false as the others, because you don't provide proof that there is no problem either). --Chire (talk) 14:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Schily, when you say "there is not a single credible statement from a legal professional that confirms a problem with cdrtools. So all all claims that talk about so called legal problems are unsourced" you're making a logical mistake. There's no requirement that Wikipedia content is sourced to legal professionals, so the later doesn't follow from the former. Also this: As you are obviously unable to verify your claim, your claim is proven false is a non-sequitur. Diego (talk) 15:07, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
You seem not to know how evidence works. You cannot expect me to verify that something does not exist as this kind of evidence is impossible. So if you like to make the claim that there is a problem, you need to prove this. If you can't, and you obviously can't, this is the evidence that there is no problem. In other words: if you don't change the article in a way that gives a hint to the fact that related claims are false claims, the article is unbalanced. Schily (talk) 15:22, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
@Schily: You seem not to know how evidence works. You cannot expect me to disprove that something does exist as this kind of evidence is impossible, too. So if you like to make the claim that there is no problem, you need to prove this. If you can't, and you obviously can't, this is the evidence (according to your definition) that there is a problem. In other words: if you change the article in a way that gives a hint to the non-fact that related claims are false claims, the article would become unbalanced and have a biased point of view. --Chire (talk) 16:02, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
As I don't want to make the claim that a problem exists, this closes the loop and we're back to start of today's discussion. Just please remember that Wikipedia is a tertiary source and it's not written from evidence, but from the accounts of evidence made by others. Diego (talk) 15:56, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
Well, there is no problem if the licensing section is removed. If you like to keep the licensing section, you need to mark the claims from Debian and Co. as false unless you intend to have an unbalanced article. So are you interested in a balanced article or in an unbalanced article? Schily (talk) 17:23, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
Again: We don't mark things as true or false, because there is WP:NOTTRUTH. There is only verified existance. The claims by Corbet/FSF/Debian/Redhat/Fedora/Whomever are existant (as the WP:Reliable sources demonstrate). A "proof" (as you like to call your theory) of them actually being incorrect is so far unsourced. Repeat after me: Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth! Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth! Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth! Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth! Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth... --Chire (talk) 17:59, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
You cannot cherry pick single rules from WP. A false claim or an unproven claim that is able to discredit a person is a personal attack that is not permitted by WP. As the cdrtools article is full of (provable) false claims and unproven claims, the current text in the article contains personal attacks against the authors of cdrtools and against the project. As WP also forbids pointers to external personal attacks, not only the direct claims in the article are in conflict with the WP rules, but all pointers to related or similar claim somere else in the net are illegal as well.
There are two ways to make the current cdrtools article legal:
  • remove all text that is related to alleged license problems in cdrtools
  • clearly mark the existing related text as verifyable wrong
As this is a clear and definite violation of the WP rules, fixing the licensing section is of course the most important issue when editing the cdrtools article. Schily (talk) 09:23, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Schily, the current rough consensus (which doesn't require unanimity) is that the content is adequate, being properly referenced to the sources we have available. You may want to request wider community input by following the dispute resolution procedures. Diego (talk) 10:24, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

There is definitely no consensus on this text. The fact that there are some hostile people in this discussion is a problem when rating the discussion, so please understand the problem and help to correct the illegal parts of the article. Schily (talk) 10:31, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
I've described several actions you can take to advance discussion on the article's status. As I'm personally satisfied with the current text, I will not take any initiative to change it unless more information is provided. Diego (talk) 10:50, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
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