Yeah, that's one of the 1% or so of politically-tinged bits of the project. The ones I can recall from the past few years are: systemd, ffmpeg vs. libav, libjpeg vs. libjpeg-turbo, and whether to ship GFDL-licensed documentation with invariant sections. Fortunately I don't really care about any of those. :-) The systemd debate is the only one of those that's actually a bit interesting to follow imo.

One quasi-political issue that has somewhat more pervasive importance is the general relationship between Debian packages and the Ubuntu packages derived from them, which occasionally is a point of friction if the maintainers have different goals. In most cases it isn't a big problem though, afaict. There are reasonable number of cases where it's even the same maintainer.

In May 2004, a Debian packet maintainer (Eduard Bloch) started to send repeated personal insults to Jörg Schilling after one of Bloch's patch requests against mkisofs was rejected because it was full of bugs.

In March 2006, a group of Debian maintainers started to attack the cdrtools project.

The latter attacks have been based on the fact that cdrtools was licensed under the GPL. As a result, on May 15th 2006 most projects from the cdrtools project bundle have been relicensed under CDDL (giving more freedom to users than the GPL does). At the same time, an important amount of additional code (DVD support code from Jörg Schilling and a Reed Solomon decoder from Heiko Eißfeldt) has been added to the freely published sources.

In summer 2006, the attacks from the group of Debian maintainers escalated and in September 2006, these people created something they call a fork from cdrtools. They soon added a lot of bugs and this way turned the "fork" into a questionable experiment. The last work on this "fork" has been done eight months later on May 6th 2007, then the leader of the attacks stopped his efforts on the fork and instead started to advertize for nerolinux. During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". There is no license problem with the original cdrtools.

Ok, we can add that: there was also a debate about a cd-r/cd-rw app, spanning a period roughly 7-10 years ago. I'm not arguing that there has never been an acrimonious debate regarding a Debian package, just that it involves a vanishingly small proportion of packages. So few that I mostly only hear about these things via places like Slashdot (or a comment like this one).

There was no debate; the developer of cdrtools was just an asshole who (for example) refused to let users specify their CD-ROM drive by its actual /dev entry because he thought Linux should use (scsibus,target,lun) to identify devices like Solaris did. Eventually he fucked up the licensing of cdrtools enough that distros couldn't legally distribute it, Debian forked the last legally-distributable version under a new name, and all the other distros switched to their fork.

> Except that most distros DID distributed it UNALTERED, like Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux.

Only the ones small enough that they don't worry about getting sued. It's not just Debian developers that think there's a licensing issue that means they can't legally distribute it; the FSF and Red Hat's legal department also agree[1], and I believe even the authors of the CDDL (the GPL-incompatible license he's releasing most of cdrtools under) think that he's wrong.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-July/...

> Only the ones small enough that they don't worry about getting sued

You got it backwards. Precisely only the big commercial distros with mighty legal teams (Debian, RedHat, Fedora) could afford to get away with violating the GPL, and stealing the name of the original project for the fork symlinks. Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.

Here I see powerful entities taking advantage of an individual hacker.

""" During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". """

""" The GPL preamble (see also Urheberrecht §14 below) disallows modifications in case they are suitable to affect the original author's reputation. As Debian installs symlinks with the original program names and as many people still believe that the symlinks with the original program names are the original software, Debian does not follow the GPL.

GPL §2a requires to keep track of any author and change date inside all changed files. This is not done in the fork.

[...]

GPL §3 requires the complete source to be distributed if there is a binary distribution. The Debian fork tarball does not include everything needed to compile the cdrtools fork (complete source) and Debian does not give a written offer to deliver the missing parts. """

> Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.

In Debian's case at least, I don't think there's an objection to third-party projects or forks using names derived from the name "Debian", so long as they aren't actually identically the name "Debian". For example, there is a distribution called "Illumian" which is made up of the Illumos base OS and a Debian-derived userspace.

Besides, I don't really see a trademark issue here. The term "cdr" preexists both of the projects, and is owned by neither of them. A person named their software after a fairly generic derivative of this term, "cdrtools". And now they are complaining that someone else named their software a different generic derivative, "cdrkit"? Do they claim that nobody else should be able to use the prefix "cdr" followed by a noun? Given that they did not even invent the prefix "cdr", that seems like quit a stretch. That's like someone who named their backup product "Backup Tool" complaining that a different product is named "Backup Kit". Sorry, but you don't own the word "backup".

What he says is that they used the literal name in symlinks, not a derivative term.

They did that so that scripts which run "cdrecord" or "mkisofs" continued to work, which I'm pretty sure is allowed under trademark law (trademarks don't apply to functional elements - if it wasn't for this, Oracle and Microsoft could kill off any third-party reimplementation of Java or many Windows APIs quite easily). If you run "cdrecord --version" it tells you that it's actually Wodim.

Ok, I agree with you entirely, just a quick response because I was quoting and so have the responsibility to avoid distorting other people's words. This didn't happen 7-10 years ago, that's when it started, but this continued happening until 2 or 3 years ago.

I hope all is clear now.

""" Ask your Linux distributor to include recent originals instead of broken forks.

Tell them that you like to decide yourself which program you choose. Whether it is the fork or whether it is the original program depends on which package works better.

[...]

The following Linux distributions currently work against the freedom of their users:

Debian, RedHat, Fedora

If you know of other unfree distributions, please report.

The following Linux distributions currently grant their users the freedom to select the better CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writing software:

Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux