Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free? (original) (raw)

Mr. Reiser, I am a gread admirer of your work; I am a great admirer of Reiserfs, both versions 3 and 4; and I am a great admirer of the concepts in Reiser4; that stated, I disagree with you in what regards to its licensing, so would you please clarify some points to me?

@ 30/04/2004 14:27 : wrote Hans Reiser :

MJ Ray wrote:

On 2004-04-30 17:26:50 +0100 Michael Milverton camel78@iprimus.com.au wrote:

I read this as meaning the following. Nobody is allowed to take the product that we produce and rename it into something else, thereby making it look as though it really belongs to someone else.

You just ignored the bit where he forbids supression of the "credits" banner?

I am flexible on the phrasing of this, and can allow some phrasing such as credits must be kept equally prominent and extensive.

It seems to me that if you are flexible about this point, you should state in your clarification which are the flexible points; this way, you will be effective in clarifying the license, and, with some effort, even to avoid the GPL + additional restrictions = undistributable kernel problem.

Although you might be able to argue for some form of this, it is clearly more restrictive than what is written in the GPL.

and it is these people who are going against the spirit of the GPL. What is the point of having the code copyrighted to Hans Reiser in the source code when all the end user gets to see is that this software is called company X.

Can you see this is exactly the kind of issue (advertising, publicity, marketing) that leads to licenses with the (in)famous "obnoxious ad clause"? Furthermore, can you see exactly *how* could this render Reiser4 undistributable by Debian?GFDL-and-RMS-issues aside, can you understand that Debian *has* to abide to its Social Contract, and even if it is amended a thousand times until we can get somewhere really stable and useful, what counters said Contract cannot be done by Debian?

It's a problem of degrees. Reasonable attribution is fine, but if every command run in boot scrips output a screen of credits, just the scrolling display would add considerably to the time and go past too quick for anyone to read anything, for example. What is the point of having the program attributed to Hans Reiser when all the end user gets to see is a blur, or becomes used to skipping these messages?

Here lies a good argument against the "ad clause": the kernel is a very complex piece of software, with hundreds of maintainers, every one of them as important to the whole as the others. What incorporating such clause in the GPL would do is to *dillute* the importance of each one, as opposing to publicize each one's participation on the whole.

I think people need to be more sensitive to the feelings of people that put such a huge amount of heart and soul into their software and not be so quick in dismissing their concerns. [...]

I agree with this. I think the same consideration should be given to the debian developers. This whole feud seems to have started because a debian package maintainer responded to a bug report

Said maintainer added a bug in the process of removing credits, and thus we found out the credits were removed. Your phrasing was not a

good description

Ok. This is the part I really have difficulty to understand, 'cause I probably missed the start of this, so I'll blast the questions away: Who removed which credits from which file? Or were it credits in a printk? Why said maintainer did it? What bug report # is this about?

Have RedHat done similar things?

Did anyone try to start some project like Flicfs, that is really Reiser4 in disguise?

Do you consider a graphical boot-screen (that would override any kernel reiser4 messages), combined with a lot of tools giving a graphical front-end to reiser4-progs in the same level of plagiarism you are

from a debian user and then they were accused of plagiarism in a confrontational response. Not really a sinister plot to steal Hans Reiser's work.

But others out there ARE willing to do so, look at RedHat and KDE....

What happened with RedHad and KDE? I really didn't understand what was the issue.

or consider various startups I know of that are more than a bit slimy about things like squid.

Would you care to elaborate, or at least give me pointers, please?

I will say again: I have nothing but respect for you and your work. I understand the issue you are trying to address. I understand your concerns, and I think reiser[34] as ultra-high-values to any distribution.I would like you to understand our limitations and work with us to reach consensus.

Thanks in advance for your answers,

-- br,M

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