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.
