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Re: plagiarism of reiserfs by Debian



On Saturday 19 April 2003 20:32, Thomas Viehmann wrote:

> b) The licensing information certainly ist misleading: The first line says
>    GPL 2, period. Then there's lengthy information for assigning copyright
>    of patches. After that, there is that funny "nothing ... shall be
> interpreted to allow you to fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my
> credits ...", which I'd probably interpret as "you cannot distribute
> without something that says...".

Well, doesn't the GPL say something on it being illegal to impose additional 
restrictions on distribution?

> c) Someone running fsck because he has trouble with his hard drive probably
>    doesn't want to see the history of mankind from the beginning to the
>    creation of reiser v3.
[...]

As a user of reiserfs: the long messages are really just annoying. the name of 
authors and sponsors is not something that I am interested in when running 
the program, this applies to programs like gcc and equally to small system 
tools like fsck. 

If the credits were really removed, this was an error. But the credits should 
really be moved into the '-v' output, or even better into the documentation.

> No other author of
> any piece of GPL'd software I know of has such obnoxious sponsorship
> messages. In fact, they are hindering usability of the tools.

Imagine if gcc had messages listing all companies that have sponsored and do 
sponsor gcc hacking...

You know, if I'm to display advertisements on my screen, I want to get 
something for it. I guess if Reiser doesn't want an fsck/mkreiserfs without 
his beloved credits message, it's time to dump reiserfs from Debian and 
switch to ext3/XFS/whatever.

cheers
-- vbi

-- 
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened
of the old ones.
		-- John Cage

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