Re: plagiarism of reiserfs by Debian

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

[ I wrote this yesterday when I first saw Hans' message on -devel, but
  postponed it to let the people who have actually had something to do
  with this to speak up.  But it seems that I was right when I assumed
  people wouldn't really know what this is about.  So, stamp a big FYI
  on this post.  Don't Cc me, I'll follow the discussion on -devel.
  Thanks. ]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2003 at 08:07:03PM +0400, Hans Reiser wrote:

 > Please explain your reasons for removing the credits and attributions
 > from the reiserfs utilities in violation of our copyright.

 Just for the benefit of people who don't have any idea what Hans is
 talking about, the following text is printed by (upstream's but not
 Debian's) mkreiserfs before exiting:

        The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the
        primary sponsor of Reiser4. DARPA does not endorse this project;
        it merely sponsors it.

        Continuing core development of version 3 is mostly paid for by
        Hans Reiser from money made selling licenses in addition to the
        GPL to companies who don't want it known that they use ReiserFS
        as a foundation for their proprietary product.  And my lawyer
        asked 'People pay you money for this?'.  Yup.  Hee Hee.  Life is
        good.  If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add
        rather than reinventing an entire FS.  You should buy some free
        software too....

        SuSE pays for continuing work on journaling for version 3, and
        paid for much of the previous version 3 work.  Reiserfs
        integration in their distro is consistently solid.

        MP3.com paid for initial journaling development.

        Bigstorage.com contributes to our general fund every month, and
        has done so for quite a long time.

        Thanks to all of those sponsors, including the secret ones.
        Without you, Hans would still have that day job, and the merry
        band of hackers would be missing quite a few....

        Have fun.

 > In the academic world, this is called plagiarism.  In the academic
 > world, knowledge is shared but fairly credited.  The GPL is born of
 > the academic tradition.

 JFTR:

  plagiarism
       n 1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else
            and is presented as being your own work
       2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as
          if they were your own [syn: {plagiarization}, {plagiarisation},
           {piracy}]

 Marcelo