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cdrtools vs cdrkit: The India-Pakistan of CD/DVD burning tools(Linux Only)

Posted: January 28, 2010
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Author: gaurish
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Filed under: Archlinux, Editorial, Linux
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Tags: No tags set for this entry.

Why you are only able to Write 4.3GB data in 4.7GB DVD-R, Read Below!

Background

Since ages ago, cdrtools was the default tool-set used for optical disc buring on Linux. Under the hood of those pretty GUI programs like k3b/brasero, was actually cdrtools which did the dirty work.it was being actively developed by a team led by Joerg Schilling.The whole code was licensed under GPL.

One fine Morning,

Mr. Schilling decided to change license to CDDL.This is where everything started to go wrong!

What is the issue?

CDDL license is incompatible with the GPL.The CDDL is intended to be GPL incompatibleso cannot be distributed along with GPL code. Hence, it became illegal for Linux Distributions to redistribute cdrtools.

Debian comes to rescue!

Linux didn’t have any alternative to cdrtools, hence debian project decided to fork last available GPLed code into Cdrkit. they dropped cdrtools and included cdrkit. every major distro like Fedora,Ubuntu,Mandriva supported debian and did the same.debian took the responsibility and start to maintain cdrkit.

Cool, everything finally settled.

No, there is one small problem.CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a lot of knowledge and also requires a lot of development effort which debian does not have.lately, it has been seen cdrkit is not been actively developed (current to last stable was around a year).Addionatlly it is technically inferior to cdrtools.cdrkit still does not generate proper iso-level-3 file systems and has trouble with big file support(the famous 4.3GB data limit in DVD against the real capacity of 4.7GB) .
This is the reason creation of proper blu-ray in linux is so hard.
it seems the developers of cdrkit don’t have the resources/skills to maintain such a complex software.

Guess, we are stuck!

So Choice is what we have in this.If you face problems with cdrkit, there are two options:

1) Built and Install Cdrtools yourself.Source is available at its Home Page. ArchLinux users can get it on aur.

2) (Last Option)Switch to propertiery closed source burning suite:NeroLinux.. if everything fails then only you should go by this route. I would strongly advise you to try choose option 1)

What is the purpose of this post
The purpose of this post if to let the users know the actual situation/state of CD/DVD burning apps in Linux. And let them select which software they want to use.

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1 person has left a comment

schily said:

Well, it seems that you are a just another victim of FUD against
OSS

Not cdrtools did change the license first but cdrtools was attacked
by a Debian packager (Eduard Bloch) This person before did
publish a lot of FUD against the project already and introduced
bugs into the Debian variant of cdrtools. The license change was
a _reaction_ on the attacks from Mr. Bloch and definitely not the
cause.

Mr. Bloch is a social problem for OSS and he did cause a lot of trouble….

He did introduce a lot more bugs into the forks and soon stopped
working on it. By doing this, he confirms that he does not have the
needed skills for working on a program suite like cdrtools. Before
he did claim he knows everything better than the original author.

Every user may decide himself on whether he will follow the ill
religious claims from Mr. Bloch and use a broken fork or whether
he likes to use the well maintained original software.

There is definitely no legal problem with cdrtools, the Sun legal
department makes it very clear that there is no such problem.
THe fork however is in conflict with the Copyright law and thus cannot
be distributed legally.

BTW: the CDDL was not made intentinally incompatible to the GPL,
but the GPLv3 was made intentionally incompatible with the GPL.
Nobodiy seems to care about this problem…..

See http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html for the real background.

If you like to do us the OSS community a favor, put some effort
in helping to tell others about what realy happened. I am working
on OSS since 1982 and I still do and I will of course do anything
that is needed to make sure that my software stays usable for
the community.

Posted on: February 22, 2010 at 12:46 amQuote this Comment

Commentors on this Post-

schilyPosted: Feb 22, 2010 at 12:46 am