RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?
Hans Reiser wrote
> Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>
> >MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >
> >>>You seem to understand the difference between credit and
> >>>advertisement as advertisements are credits for those you dislike.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>You seem to understand the difference between modification and
> >>plagiarism as plagiarism is a modification that you dislike
> because it
> >>doesn't praise you enough.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >To be fair, these credits really do seem to be for others. Some of
> >them are credits *and* ads, and at least one is an ad for work for
> >Hans Reiser and Namesys, but they are credits as well, and most of
> >them for other people.
> >
> >-Brian
> >
> >
> >
> I could be talked into eliminating the one for me, though I
> have always
> found it a bit of a pain that people
> are a bit eager to think that I am some sort of businessman who hired
> russians because he wasn't abstractly inclined himself. They seem to
> think I am some sort of businessman fool enough to invest into free
> software, rather than a guy who wanted to build something and
> couldn't
> get anyone to fund it so he paid for reiserfs to come into
> existence by
> working a day job for 5.5 years. They often don't realize that I am
> responsible for basic architectural features, like the idea of
> aggregating small files together rather than always page
> aligning them,
> or that the most controversial deep design changes of V4
> versus V3 were
> mine.
Personally, when I read the info on Namesys.com I assumed Hans
had designed pretty much all of Reiser 4. It was only later when I read (I can't remember precisely where) a page where Hans credited members of his team that I knew that others had contributed a lot. I will continue to credit Hans with a massive contribution to filesystem theory and practise. Credit for their work should be given freely :-)
Looking at a couple of lines of information about contributers each time I use ReiserFS progs is just not a problem for me - but it also seems plain to me that restricting changes to the source means that they cannot be put in debian. The license restriction is not compatible with the GPL.
Since the actual Reiser4 filesystem is fully free and GPL licensed, can debian include it without the Reiser programs? If some one wants to write GPL compatible reiserfs progs later then all is available "free" - so this does not seem to put the debian social contract in a complete bind. For now, obviously, a user is going to have to use the non-gpl-compatible (and hence non-debian) utilities to create a filesystem, and contributers to it will be credited.
> Probably the current one mentioning me needs more work, as it doesn't
> really say all this, sigh.
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