Re: If Debian decides that the Gnu Free Doc License is not free...
> ["About" menu item]
> First time users go to them expecting to find out what
> the program does, and instead they get the name of the author and remain
> just as puzzled about what the program itself is for as they were
> before. I hate them.
I see.. :) It has become a GUI idiom though, so most people probably know
already what an "About" box is.
> I want the same visibility of credits for reiserfs that movies give for
> their actors.
An interesting point. However, a movie goer is prepared for five minutes of
credits with entertaining music in the background before 2 hours of the
actual movie but a person running a disk utility will probably find it quite
distracting to see a lot of stuff unrelated to the task at hand. What she
appreciates, is information about the process.
There are always quite a few programs involved in almost any task you make in
Unix. If the kernel, disk driver, shell, sed, readline and disk utilities all
wrote their credits while formatting a disk, the operating system would be
nearly unusable. In that perspective, I hope you can understand why a Debian
developer striving to put together a quality OS may consider it necessary to
trim the output. A small amount of credits (perhaps pointing to a complete
author list) is usually fine but if it's more than, say, 5 lines.. It's a
balancing act between respecting the original work of the software authors
and the wishes and needs of the users.
What would you suggest as a solution?
> I don't want the distro choosing how they are displayed
> because some distros do things like create boot time splash screens that
> tell about themselves instead of the authors, and so I have to say that
> their track record demonstrates that they cannot be trusted with that
> task.
Mm.. I guess such splash screens are made mainly for two reasons: making their
marketing easier and because novice users feel intimidated by screenfulls of
text at startup. I agree that the first reason can be seen as a disrespectful
act but the coin also has another side: compelling marketing of free
operating systems helps giving them a wider audience, which is good for the
distributed software, too.
> If someone wants to create a boot program and/or screensaver that picks
> a random OS component to describe the authors of at boot time, that
> would be nicest of all.
Yes, that's certainly a nice idea. (It would also mask the Linux driver's
credits though, but at least they would get the same treatment as the rest of
the system.)
- Jarno
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