[_delirium]

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).

[makomk]

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.

[e7620]

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