Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?
On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Putting Stallman's (or FSF's) work in the non-free section of your
> distribution is the lack of respect and gratitude that I speak of.
That perhaps is unfortunate, but we have expended extreme amounts of
effort in attempting to get both yourself and the FSF to consider
licensing there works in a manner consistent with the ideals of the
free software movement and Debian's own Social Contract and DFSG.
I hope you can see that it is a measure of our respect that we have
expended this effort instead of merely leaving these works in
non-free.[1]
> This happens due to peer reviewed journals in science.
It happens even in journals that are not peer reviewed, and merely
editor reviewed, because it is the way that the broader scientific
community expects people to behave.
> In free software there is no such social mechanism affecting RedHat
> and preventing them from removing the k from all the kde programs.
Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.
This is no different than what happens when someone fails to properly
attribute in a scientific journal. The community at large complains,
and the problem is dealt with, or at least made public.
[Finally, Debian isn't in the business of marketing at all. We are
interested in producing the best Free operating system(s) possible,
but aren't (in general) particularly worried about how many people
actually use Debian. We take the "If you build it, they will come"
approach.]
> you already did, you removed the credits from ReiserFS (none of
> which are credits for me, please keep that in mind, I do not take
> this stand for my personal benefit, my name is on the filesystem and
> that is more than enough credit for me).
The patch that you're refering to is currently not even applied. What
it actually did was add a -quiet option to suppress the outputing of
the DARPA sponsorship message.
Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
> What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs. We follow
copyright, and almost always follow author and copyright holder
requests with respect to their work.
> the end user is not the issue, I think the current phrasing even
> defines that the end user can remove them.
Yes, but in order for the work to be free, the end user must also be
capable of distributing his or her modifications.
Don Armstrong
1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to work
on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion, and Debian is
itself comitted to doing it's utmost to bring works to a state where
they can be freely included in Debian.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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