Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

First of all, compassion and condolences for Schilling’s family.

Second of all, I had a very recent positive interaction with him. I recently was in contact with Mr. Schilling to report a bug in CDR tools. Even though he was (looking back) dying, he was very prompt in replying to me and discussing the bug with me over email. However, even though I gave him a fix, he was unable to apply it, probably because of his poor health.

Thirdly, there is a really serious bug in CDR tools: It will start creating bad timestamps in 2028. That’s not a typo: 2028 (not 2038). Because of how ISO 9660 filesystems store timestamps (8-bit number, 0 is 1900), on 2038 (1900 + 128), unless the 8-bit number is explicitly made an unsigned number (assumed with other ISO 9660 implementations), there will be issues with timestamps. [1]

A full bug report, complete with a bugfix is here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=990468

A fork of cdrtools with this bug fixed is on GitHub: https://github.com/samboy/iso9660

Again, prayers for Schilling’s family, and he was very professional in his interactions with me, even in his final days.

[1] The issue is with how Schilling’s CDR tools calculates timezones; the time zone becomes an invalid number starting in 2028.

Hehe. I’m not sure someone’s epitaph is the appropriate place to report a bug. On the other hand, after thinking about it, I hope someone reports a bug in one of my tools in my obituary thread :)

Donald Knuth has a unique solution to the “bugs after death” problem. When he dies, TeX goes to version pi, and METAFONT to version e. All bugs become features.

> May his software immortalize him.

I wish we had a better word for what strenholme is doing besides "maintainer".

To have known the deceased and decide to continue their work is something special indeed.

It is sort of beautiful in a way. It reminds me of how people will look back on a musician's discography when they pass. For programmers, maybe looking through their code and the unique voice they expressed through it is what we do.

Well it looks like cdrtools is in need of a new maintainer now, if the outcome is that you carry on the legacy and let the tool live on, that would be great!

Yes, indeed, I’ve been annoyed that there isn’t a maintainer for the Debian port for a while. I will maintain the code based on the final pure-GPL version of the code, to avoid the entire licensing issue.

If Eric Youngdale could come out of the woodwork and retroactively add a “CDR tools, as a special GPL exception, can integrate CDDL licensed code” clause, that might allow us to use Schilling’s more recent code, but, to be safe, I prefer to work with the older codebase to keep the license simple.

> I will maintain the code based on the final pure-GPL version of the code, to avoid the entire licensing issue.

But that's what Debian did already with wodim/cdrkit much to Jörg's dismay. I don't think it received much development and afaik never got BluRay support.

The wodim / cdrkit stuff is what I would maintain -- there are a lot of bugs for it which have been ignored for too long:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=geniso...

> to be safe

If the copyright holder is dead, there is nothing to be afraid of in violating his license, surely...? At worst you could ask his heirs to add that exception.

It'll be up to the estate of the rights holder, and they are less likely to understand the nuances of open source licensing.

Yes. In the 'reverts to copyright' view of GPL, the estate gets full rights and can proceed however they wish. Which, thanks to the Mouse Corporation, is a long time.

> Copyright protection generally lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. If the work was a "work for hire", then copyright persists for 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...]

I hope that SCCS and bosh will also have new maintainers. I use them both.

I guess there is a typo the second time you wrote "2038".

Yep, and of course the edit window is now closed so the typo now stays.

in

> A fork of cdrtools with this bug fixed is on GitHub: https://github.com/samboy/iso9660

I dedicate this repo this his memory. --> I dedicate this repo to his memory.

Fixed: https://github.com/samboy/img9660/commit/54f144a3367d559fc22...

> While it has not been brought to court, some lawyers, include the Free Software Foundation’s legal counsel, feel the CDDL may be incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Which is irrelevant as the code does not contain any GPL code, right?

The cdrtools stuff is GPL because Schilling maintained the code after Eric Youngdale [1] stopped working on it.

[1] Youngdale at one point was one of the Yggdrasil Linux developers, for people using Linux long enough to remember that long since abandoned distro.

Ah! I see. Thank you, I missed this part of the story.

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