Dawson, Larry wrote:
Hans Reiser wrote
Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
Most people don't read Namesys.com, they only know about the name of the
filesystem, and the credits are very much needed in mkreiser4 to inform
them. In those credits, I am just one of the randomly chosen
developers/sponsors.
Probably I should put the developer credits somewhere on the namesys
main page rather than just under the developers button. Thanks for
pointing that out.
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.
Do you really think that there exists some moron willing to spend 4-5
man-years just so that debian can freely eliminate mention of who built
reiser4?
Pr
