On Mon, 2003-04-21 at 02:08, Hans Reiser wrote: > I find it unspeakably ingrateful to Stallman that some of you begrudge > him his right to express his (discomforting to some) views to all who > use his software, and to ensure that they are not removed by those suits > who are discomforted. Our current activities on the GFDL involve writing up a list of objections to the license, to present to the FSF. We are doing this before removing the software from Debian. I think this shows great respect for Mr. Stallman and the FSF that we are spending a fair amount of time forming a consensus about what we feel needs changing in the GFDL, writing that down clearly, and sending it to him, all while ignoring our own principles, spelled out in the DFSG, in the meantime. It has nothing to do with wanting to remove the GNU Manifesto from the EMACS manual; Debian, as a whole, certainly has no hatred of RMS or his views. We even have a 'vrms' package in the distro. -legal just has a disagreement with him over some details of the GFDL. Consider that an Evil Company, say, starting with the letter 'M', could apparently make its changes to the documentation of a GFDL-licensed document near-proprietary by adding invariant sections and cover texts that are unconscionable to the original author. Something like an invariant section on how the original author's coding style resembles the intelligence of the infamous paper clip. And a cover text that "Linux Sucks". > As far as I am concerned, I have no desire to have ReiserFS distributed > for free by anyone who removes the GNU manifesto or similar expressions > from Stallman's work (or my own) and redistributes it. It is simply a > matter of respect that is due the author. That the list of credits was completely removed from reiserfsprogs was surely a mistake. I'm sure Ed will, or already has, fixed it, given that Debian may continue to distribute reiserfsprogs. It should of been included in /usr/share/doc. However, the 20+ lines of credits on every run of mkreiserfs was certainly removed on purpose and needed to be. There are a lot of 24-line terminals, not all with scroll back, and that makes a 20+ line message a major problem. Especially since the time the admin is running it is probably during major system maintainance or recovery, when stress is quite high, and where being able to see what he has done already is quite important. Especially since the credit message, being last would cause the important technical messages, warnings, errors, etc. to scroll off screen. Should the remove have been done in a different way? Quote possibly. An alternative that springs to mind would be adding a --credits flag, and a short (one-line) message to inform the user of that option. I guess the basic question now is, does the license reiserfsprogs is distributed under allow the above change?
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