RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?
Burnes, James wrote:
> It disturbs me that such a great piece of software engineering like
> ReiserV3 and V4 is sullied by licensing arguments about whether someone
> is going to plagiarize them.
>
> I imagine that nearly all software engineers would be horrified at the
> thought of stealing the Reiser3 and 4 code and representing them as
> their own.
Which is quite illegal anyway, for a multitude of different reasons.
> l. Is it that you believe the John Q Software is going to rip off your
> software and represent it as their own work. That would be plagiarism
> and I think very very rare in the FOSS community.
And it's contrary to law. And if it's done by stripping copyright notices,
it's copyright violation.
> 2. Are you unhappy with the fact that a few of the major distros are
> charging money for support and representing the software itself as their
> own creation? Wouldn't that already be in contravention of GPL V2?
Yes.
> Are
> you unhappy with the fact that some distros make *a lot* of money and
> fail to credit the FOSS people that made it possible? Arguably the
> market determines whether their support and package integration are
> worthy of financial support, just as the DOD determines whether V4 is
> worth of their support. The relative discrepancy in reward vs. effort
> is an economic discussion beyond the scope of this.
>
> 3. Is it that you simply want an efficient mechanism for cataloging
> efforts of the major contributors to a project? If that's the case why
> don't we just come up with some sort of credits standard to be macro
> embedded in the binaries? That way anyone could view the credits by
> running a 'credits' shell command against the binary/library/kernel etc.
> Obviously the macros would be viewable in source.
Nice idea. I like it. It's also a good way to put the copyright notices
*into* the binaries, rather than merely next to them. How about a standard
ELF section for credits? :-)
<snip>
> Hopefully the issue doesn't devolve into an argument about forcing
> people to read the credits, nagware like, during the execution of the
> code. That would simply not scale at all and would aggressively
> de-select your software free or otherwise from an open environment.
I thought it already had devolved into that. :-)
<snip>
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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