Re: plagiarism of reiserfs by Debian
It is really a question of, do you respect the authors?
Stallman never imagined that anyone in the free software business would
be other than a gentleman. Then the OS rather than just the kernel got
named Linux by those who found his politics inconvenient to their
business, and the k got dropped from all the kde utilities by persons
not the authors of them, and it is a lot easier to imagine that
presumptuous persons who are not gentlemen would take it upon themselves
to remove credits because they find it inconvenient that the authors be
given the attention and notice rather than the distros.
Feel free to make the credits more CPU efficient, reformat them to fit a
screen, animate them, anything that adheres to the academic attribution
spirit of respecting those who contributed years of their lives at the
cost of substantial reductions in their lifetime incomes so that users
(I don't care in the least about distros) could be free to modify the
code, and the poor able to afford the same information infrastructure as
all the rest of us.
If you want to add attributions (perhaps mentioning the inventors of
balanced tree algorithms, etc.), or add a statement that Debian feels
the listed persons didn't deserve the credit and somebody else did, I
will respect any honest endeavor in that regard (and maybe even use the
improvements in the crediting in what we distribute on our website).
Simple deletion is hard to respect though.
You'll note that the changes don't significantly affect me (as long as
it is called ReiserFS I am getting at least my share of credit). It
mostly affects all persons other than me who aren't getting their fair
share of credit as it is.
Academia, while it respects the right to modify knowledge, has never respected failures to attribute, and hopefully most of you do not either once it is brought to your attention.
Now, another person has suggested that this was due to an error rather
than deliberate action. I would be happy to apologize if this is the
case. I am not sure it is.
Please inform me whether Debian respects the authors of free software,
as much as Stallman naively but understandably imagined everyone would
without any need for anything to be said about it.
I wish Stallman would hurry it up with GPL V3. He probably wishes
people were gentlemen enough that it would not be needed. He does not
spend much time with marketeers wearing suits and counting brand
presence in dollars I think, sigh. I really did not expect this from
Debian of all distros.... You should not imitate RedHat in this.
--
Hans
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