The end user can choose to read it, or they can choose not
to. Regardless, they should not be assaulted by the credits or forced
to read them. Going back to journal articles, is the funding grant
number emblazoned in 24 point font above the article title?[1]
What if there just were a compromise?
Of course it sucks if Reiser4 gets only into non-free, because it would
never then be in the official installer. Besides, from what I've understood,
Debian developers spend quite some time bickering amongst themselves, causing
the Sarge installer to be delayed by a year or so and having the possibility
of completely detaching non-free from Debian.
What this probably means is that the DDs will be fighting each other over
stuff like this for eons and eons and if non-free is detached entirely
it will be even more difficult to get a non-free installer with Reiser4
on it. At least now it could be downloadable from Debian, unless some
policy forbids hosting of non-free installers but not non-free software.
I know it's a tough bullet to bite for Hans if he just removed the addition
to the license and formatted the credits so that no-one would even want
to remove them. AFAIK the reason they were removed was that they were too
big.
Oh, and the funding grant thing, weren't the credits of mkfs.reiserfs
in the end? Where else? It's not like they were flooded all the bloody
time in 24-point font above the title...
I should probably run an mkfs.reiser4 and see the notorious credits, because
I can't remember anything offensive about them.