Re: plagiarism of reiserfs by Debian
Keep in mind you're talking to a bunch of people who are amoung the
staunchest free software advocates around. Unlike you, most of them make
$0 for all their contributions. Your implication that we're somehow
profiting from the removal of credits is ludicrous. In any case, there is
already a widely accepted defacto standard for credits in software
circles, much as their is in the academic press. Try sending your next
paper off with the condition that it be pulished only if the journal
prints the names of all the contributors in really big letters together
with a solicitation for money all on a page of its own.
Well maybe if you were Einstein they would publish it. But ReiserFS is a
long way from being a technical necessity. In fact its got a reputation
for causing problems. Noisy licenses (and noisy arguments about noisy
licenses) certainly benefit you; their usefulness to the community is
questionable.
Britton Kerin
__
GNU GPL: "The Source will be with you... always."
Britton Kerin
On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Hans Reiser wrote:
> 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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