Debian's cdrtools fork began in 2004 and took the cdrkit name in 2006 amid the later GPL/CDDL license dispute. The fork received almost no updates after 2010 while the original continued development until its author Jörg Schilling died in 2021.
cdrtools/cdrkit provides command-line tools for CD/DVD burning, ripping, and ISO image creation. The licensing dispute centered on whether linking GPL code with CDDL code in the same binary created a conflict, a question that remains debated in open-source legal circles.
The cdrtools saga is one of open source's most acrimonious licensing disputes. Jörg Schilling created cdrtools (including the widely-used cdrecord, mkisofs, and cdda2wav) as the first portable CD burning software. When Sun Microsystems released the CDDL license, Schilling — a Sun employee and OpenSolaris contributor — released parts of cdrtools under it.
Debian developers argued that the CDDL was incompatible with the GPL, meaning the combined work couldn't be legally distributed. Schilling vehemently disagreed, insisting there was no license conflict. The dispute became deeply personal, with Schilling calling the Debian fork 'not legally redistributable' and Debian developers accusing Schilling of being deliberately obstructionist.
In 2006, Debian created cdrkit as a fork of the last GPL-only version of cdrtools, renaming cdrecord to 'wodim', mkisofs to 'genisoimage', and cdda2wav to 'icedax'. Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu followed Debian's lead and switched to cdrkit.
But here's the thing: virtually nobody worked on cdrkit after forking it. The last meaningful release was cdrkit 1.1.11 in 2010, and since then, the fork has received essentially zero bug fixes or enhancements. Meanwhile, Schilling continued actively developing the original cdrtools with new features, bug fixes, and hardware support until his death from kidney cancer on October 10, 2021.
The result was that most Linux users were running a decade-old fork of CD burning software, full of unfixed bugs, while the actively maintained upstream was available but blacklisted by their distributions over a licensing disagreement. After Schilling's death, a group of volunteers took over cdrtools maintenance, hosting it on Codeberg.
Cdrkit is the rare case of a fork that 'won' distribution adoption but 'lost' in every other meaningful sense — it was technically inferior, unmaintained, and existed purely because of a legal disagreement that may not have been valid in the first place.
Schilling releases parts of cdrtools under CDDL
Debian starts the cdrtools fork; the cdrkit rename comes later in 2006
Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu switch to cdrkit
cdrkit 1.1.11 released — effectively the last release
Jörg Schilling dies; original cdrtools development later continues via volunteers on Codeberg
Cdrkit demonstrated that distribution-level adoption doesn't guarantee fork health. For over a decade, millions of Linux users ran unmaintained CD burning software because of a licensing disagreement. The situation highlighted how distribution maintainers' legal interpretations can override technical merit.