Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Domenico Andreoli]

hi Hans,

  we have bad news for your filesystems :(( it happens that some sections
of the license are not compatible with Debian Free Software Guidelines [0].

Even more grave is that something makes them also not suited for debian's
non-free archive.

I'm sorry but if thing do not get fixed, this stuff won't ship with
next distribution release.

Here follows the message posted to debian-legal mailing list which
starts the thread.

cheers
domenico

[0] http://www.debian.org/social_contract

- Forwarded message from Sami Liedes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:40:13 +0300
From: Sami Liedes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: reiser4 non-free?

[Cc:'d to the reiser4progs maintainers. Please Cc: me when replying,
I'm not subscribed to -legal.]

There has previously been discussion at least in April 2003 on this
list about the freeness of reiserfs.

It seems a further "clarification" has been added to the license (GPL
+ clarifications) in both reiser4progs and kernel-patch-2.6-reiser4
since then. This is the section that has been modified:

> Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
> fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits such as by creating
> a front end that hides my credits from the user or renaming mkreiser4
> to mkyourcompanyfs or even just make_filesystem, without my
> permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
> If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
> fair, ask.  (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
> to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)

New here is the "such as by creating a front end that hides [...] or
even just make_filesystem". The controversy last year was created by
mkreiserfs printing an overly verbose (tens of lines of sponsor
credits and other non-licensing information) advertisement when
running from the command line and Mr. Reiser's assertion that removing
it violates the GPL.

To me, these new "clarifications" seem non-free. (IANADD, and I
believe the other IANA* goes without saying. :-)

Another section has been added after the above one:

> Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
> system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
> interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
> considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
> choice.

Surely a license cannot add anything to the set of derived works (if
the other work is not derived, the license obviously doesn't apply to
it and hence never gets to say it is derived; if it is, it is even
without the license saying so). However I believe -legal has not
considered text like this a problem before (I might be wrong though).

Sami

- End forwarded message -


-[ Domenico Andreoli, aka cavok
 --[ http://people.debian.org/~cavok/gpgkey.asc
   ---[ 3A0F 2F80 F79C 678A 8936  4FEE 0677 9033 A20E BC50

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2004 at 09:32:46PM +0200, Domenico Andreoli wrote:
>   we have bad news for your filesystems :(( it happens that some sections
> of the license are not compatible with Debian Free Software Guidelines [0].

Who is Domenico Andreoli? I have not noticed them as a debian-legal
summariser before. Who asked for this to be summarised and sent upstream so
soon?

-- 
MJR/slef

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Joerg Jaspert]

MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>>   we have bad news for your filesystems :(( it happens that some sections
>> of the license are not compatible with Debian Free Software Guidelines [0].
> Who is Domenico Andreoli? I have not noticed them as a debian-legal
> summariser before. Who asked for this to be summarised and sent upstream so
> soon?

A little bit of searching would have given you "Package (co)-maintainer of
reiserfs stuff".
And he simply notified Upstream about an upcoming problem with his crap
license in one of the packages he (co)-maintains.
Where is the problem?

-- 
bye Joerg
 Aqua mach mal man brain
 maxx: schon probiert das gibts ned

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-04-25 21:57:08 +0100 Joerg Jaspert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

A little bit of searching would have given you "Package 
(co)-maintainer of

reiserfs stuff".


I didn't have a full connection at the time and it wasn't showing in 
apt-cache. Sorry for asking if you will take offence :P

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Someone posted the following on slashdot, presumably a debian someone:

   Nobody's saying that your proprietary hardware will cease to work in
   Debian. The packages will still exist; they'll just be in the
   "non-free" section, separated out so that people who don't want any
   non-free software can omit that section from their sources.list
   file. Non-free packages are technically not part of Debian, but if
   you have a non-free line in your sources.list, there's no difference
   whatsoever in how you use them.

So hopefully, Debian can print out some nice warning that Reiser4 is not 
plagiarizable, and if the user indicates that they still want to use it 
anyway, they can go forward.


I find Debian's aggressive behavior toward myself, and especially 
Richard Stallman and his GFDL, to be inappropriate and ungrateful, but I 
also understand that Debian is striving to define its morality, and that 
much of the world shares its rather asian attitude towards whether it is 
acceptable to not credit others for their contributions to science. I do 
not. I think the western approach of rigor in attribution has been of 
great value in stimulating innovation over the centuries, and think it 
should be applied to free software as much as it was to free science 
research.


I don't expect to convince Debian of this, especially not after your 
vote that you recently had, but it would be pleasant if users who don't 
mind attribution are able to select reiser4 if they want it.


Hans



Domenico Andreoli wrote:


hi Hans,

 we have bad news for your filesystems :(( it happens that some sections
of the license are not compatible with Debian Free Software Guidelines [0].

Even more grave is that something makes them also not suited for debian's
non-free archive.

I'm sorry but if thing do not get fixed, this stuff won't ship with
next distribution release.

Here follows the message posted to debian-legal mailing list which
starts the thread.

cheers
domenico

[0] http://www.debian.org/social_contract

- Forwarded message from Sami Liedes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:40:13 +0300
From: Sami Liedes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: reiser4 non-free?

[Cc:'d to the reiser4progs maintainers. Please Cc: me when replying,
I'm not subscribed to -legal.]

There has previously been discussion at least in April 2003 on this
list about the freeness of reiserfs.

It seems a further "clarification" has been added to the license (GPL
+ clarifications) in both reiser4progs and kernel-patch-2.6-reiser4
since then. This is the section that has been modified:

 


Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits such as by creating
a front end that hides my credits from the user or renaming mkreiser4
to mkyourcompanyfs or even just make_filesystem, without my
permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
fair, ask.  (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)
   



New here is the "such as by creating a front end that hides [...] or
even just make_filesystem". The controversy last year was created by
mkreiserfs printing an overly verbose (tens of lines of sponsor
credits and other non-licensing information) advertisement when
running from the command line and Mr. Reiser's assertion that removing
it violates the GPL.

To me, these new "clarifications" seem non-free. (IANADD, and I
believe the other IANA* goes without saying. :-)

Another section has been added after the above one:

 


Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
choice.
   



Surely a license cannot add anything to the set of derived works (if
the other work is not derived, the license obviously doesn't apply to
it and hence never gets to say it is derived; if it is, it is even
without the license saying so). However I believe -legal has not
considered text like this a problem before (I might be wrong though).

Sami

- End forwarded message -


-[ Domenico Andreoli, aka cavok
--[ http://people.debian.org/~cavok/gpgkey.asc
  ---[ 3A0F 2F80 F79C 678A 8936  4FEE 0677 9033 A20E BC50


 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
> So hopefully, Debian can print out some nice warning that Reiser4 is
> not plagiarizable, and if the user indicates that they still want to
> use it anyway, they can go forward.

We have to ascertain as well that we can even legally distribute
it. Assuming reiser4 is not a derivative work of any other GPLed code,
there shouldn't be a problem with it in non-free, but if it is, we
cannot distribute it at all, as the extra clarifications clearly are
not GPL compatible.

> I find Debian's aggressive behavior toward myself, and especially
> Richard Stallman and his GFDL, to be inappropriate and ungrateful,

Just to clarify, what you are seeing is individuals who may (or may
not) be associated with the Debian project, not Debian itself. [This
is no less different than conflating yourself with the University of
Erlangen-Nürnberg or Richard with the FSF.]

> I also understand that Debian is striving to define its morality,
> and that much of the world shares its rather asian attitude towards
> whether it is acceptable to not credit others for their
> contributions to science. I do not. I think the western approach of
> rigor in attribution has been of great value in stimulating
> innovation over the centuries, and think it should be applied to
> free software as much as it was to free science research.

I don't think anyone involved in Debian or in the larger Debian
community feels that you or Richard, or any other contributor to the
Free Software movement should fail to be properly recognized for their
voluminous contributions to the movement.

What I, and others who also have contributed to this movement object
to is the abridging of freedoms to attain the secondary goal of
rigorous attribution.

I know in my own scientific work I expect that people who use the
ideas that come from my work to cite and refer to the work which
spawned their ideas in an appropriate manner. However, I am loth to
define exactly how they refer to my work, as this can be as stifling
to their ability to build upon my work as me failing to publish or
communicate it.

Rest assured that many of us are practitioners of rigorous attribution
and would not fail to attribute someone appropriately. However, we are
also well aware that the nature of attribution changes from medium to
medium, and that a form of attribution rigorously defined by license
would necessarily interfere with the ability of the end user to modify
the work in ways that are traditionally embraced by the Free Software
community at large.

As always, if I can assist you in finding a method to bring your
wishes in harmony with the DFSG and Debian, please don't hesitate to
let me know.


Don Armstrong

-- 
If you wish to strive for peace of soul, then believe; if you wish to
be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
 -- Friedrich Nietzsche

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Stewart Smith]

On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 05:32, Domenico Andreoli wrote:
> > Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
> > system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
> > interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
> > considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
> > choice.
> 
> Surely a license cannot add anything to the set of derived works (if
> the other work is not derived, the license obviously doesn't apply to
> it and hence never gets to say it is derived; if it is, it is even
> without the license saying so). However I believe -legal has not
> considered text like this a problem before (I might be wrong though).

It doesn't "add", it clarifies. i.e. if you build a clustered file
system that does stuff specific to reiserfs (e.g. use the reiser4
syscall), then that will be considered a derived work, and must be
distributable under the GPL.

Sure, you could go to court and argue that it isn't - but namesys have a
clear clarification of what they consider, so I hope your lawyer is good
:)

Think of it in the same light as the clarification in the kernel's copy
of the GPL saying that userspace programs aren't derived. except here
it's the other way around.
-- 
Stewart Smith ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.flamingspork.com/



signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Don Armstrong wrote:


On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
 


So hopefully, Debian can print out some nice warning that Reiser4 is
not plagiarizable, and if the user indicates that they still want to
use it anyway, they can go forward.
   



We have to ascertain as well that we can even legally distribute
it. Assuming reiser4 is not a derivative work of any other GPLed code,
there shouldn't be a problem with it in non-free, but if it is, we
cannot distribute it at all, as the extra clarifications clearly are
not GPL compatible.

 


I find Debian's aggressive behavior toward myself, and especially
Richard Stallman and his GFDL, to be inappropriate and ungrateful,
   



Just to clarify, what you are seeing is individuals who may (or may
not) be associated with the Debian project, not Debian itself. [This
is no less different than conflating yourself with the University of
Erlangen-Nürnberg or Richard with the FSF.]
 

Putting Stallman's (or FSF's) work in the non-free section of your 
distribution is the lack of respect and gratitude that I speak of.


 


I also understand that Debian is striving to define its morality,
and that much of the world shares its rather asian attitude towards
whether it is acceptable to not credit others for their
contributions to science. I do not. I think the western approach of
rigor in attribution has been of great value in stimulating
innovation over the centuries, and think it should be applied to
free software as much as it was to free science research.
   



I don't think anyone involved in Debian or in the larger Debian
community feels that you or Richard, or any other contributor to the
Free Software movement should fail to be properly recognized for their
voluminous contributions to the movement.

What I, and others who also have contributed to this movement object
to is the abridging of freedoms to attain the secondary goal of
rigorous attribution.

I know in my own scientific work I expect that people who use the
ideas that come from my work to cite and refer to the work which
spawned their ideas in an appropriate manner.

This happens due to peer reviewed journals in science.  In free software 
there is no such social mechanism affecting RedHat and preventing them 
from removing the k from all the kde programs.  In fact there is a 
tradition among marketeers to debrand all inclusions into a product 
which is the exact opposite of fairly attribute, and they act in 
accordance with that tradition.  This is a real problem.



However, I am loth to
define exactly how they refer to my work, as this can be as stifling
to their ability to build upon my work as me failing to publish or
communicate it.

Rest assured that many of us are practitioners of rigorous attribution
and would not fail to attribute someone appropriately.

Uh no, you already did, you removed the credits from ReiserFS (none of 
which are credits for me, please keep that in mind, I do not take this 
stand for my personal benefit, my name is on the filesystem and that is 
more than enough credit for me).



However, we are
also well aware that the nature of attribution changes from medium to
medium, and that a form of attribution rigorously defined by license
would necessarily interfere with the ability of the end user to modify
the work in ways that are traditionally embraced by the Free Software
community at large.
 

What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?  None.  
There is no alternative actually.  Also, the end user is not the issue, 
I think the current phrasing even defines that the end user can remove them.



As always, if I can assist you in finding a method to bring your
wishes in harmony with the DFSG and Debian, please don't hesitate to
let me know.


Don Armstrong

 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

I just want to add that I am very grateful to Domenico for the work he 
has done in trying to aid integration.


It is a pity that Debian and Suse historically silently cut the 
attributions (this was before Domenico got involved with us) rather than 
engaging us in a dialogue about them first, thus inspiring the current 
license.  Once it was brought to our attention, we did reduce the size 
of the credits by using a random credit program instead of exhaustively 
crediting everyone.  If I didn't see what RedHat was doing to KDE, and 
didn't see cutting of developer credits as a growing trend among 
distros, we probably would not be moving to an anti-plagiarism 
license.   You the distros created the need for less free licensing by 
your behavior, frankly.


Hans

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-04-30 13:02:19 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

It is a pity that Debian and Suse historically silently cut the 
attributions 


I think you will find that Debian would leave the copyright 
attribution notices, warranty disclaimer and statement of licence. 
Doing otherwise is a bug and can be dealt with simply.


Sadly, your "invariant section"-inspired changes to the GPL cause 
other problems, which seem similar to combining an ad-clause licence 
with the GPL.


[...] rather than engaging us in a 
dialogue about them first, thus inspiring the current license.


Maybe it could have been handled better, but you didn't seem to engage 
in a dialogue on the banner removal before publicly accusing debian of 
intentional plagiarism, so it's not entirely a debian communication 
failure.


[...] You the distros created the need for less free 
licensing by your behavior, frankly.


There is no need for less free licensing.

--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jeremy Hankins]

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
> None.  There is no alternative actually.

Exactly: we offer no alternative.  This is not a disagreement about
which method of ensuring attribution is correct and acceptable, but a
disagreement about whether or not it is appropriate to force attribution
according to some particular standard.

It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever
social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's
position is that that will make the license non-free.  If you wish to
require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free.  If
you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think
about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free.  Just as, when you
require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
that's fine, but non-free.

Though it may not be obvious given the rhetoric surrounding the issue,
this is at its heart about pragmatism and compromise.  In a free society
we allow others freedoms that we sincerely hope they will not avail
themselves of.  But we allow it, because people disagree, and
disagreement is (or can be, at least) good and productive.  We prefer to
use arguments rather than force (whether legal or physical) to get our
points across, because in doing so we improve everyones understanding of
the issues (including our own).

If we disagree on the above paragraph, we disagree on fundamental
principles.  If, however, you agree there (though perhaps not with the
rest) please explain where you think the disagreement shows up, because
we may be able to make sense of things.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Scott James Remnant]

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 04:48 -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:

> Putting Stallman's (or FSF's) work in the non-free section of your 
> distribution is the lack of respect and gratitude that I speak of.
> 
No, that would be nothing to do with respect or gratitude; but a simple
licence problem.  We require that the licences of all software in our
main distribution meet certain standards of freedom, the GFDL at this
time sadly doesn't.

It's nothing personal; we fully respect Richard's wishes to prevent
modification of important GNU philosophy and licence his documentation
to ensure this.

We respect him. so are obeying his wishes in the only way our Social
Contract allows us to do ... rather than disobeying his wishes.

Likewise I'm sure most of us respect your wish to prevent the removal of
your attributes, and we will obey those wishes in the only way our
Social Contract allows us to do.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?


signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Jeremy Hankins wrote:
> Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> 
>>What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
>>None.  There is no alternative actually.
> 
> 
> Exactly: we offer no alternative.  This is not a disagreement about
> which method of ensuring attribution is correct and acceptable, but a
> disagreement about whether or not it is appropriate to force attribution
> according to some particular standard.
> 
> It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever
> social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's
> position is that that will make the license non-free.  If you wish to
> require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free.  If
> you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think
> about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free.  Just as, when you
> require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
> that's fine, but non-free.

Did you say this as an official debian spokesperson?


Carl-Daniel

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Michael Milverton]

Is this the licencing in question?

###
Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits such as by creating
a front end that hides my credits from the user or renaming mkreiser4
to mkyourcompanyfs or even just make_filesystem, without my
permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
fair, ask.  (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)

Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
choice.
###

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. 

The way I read the GPL is that it is essentially giving you the freedom to 
copy change and modify the code as long you pass this freedom along.

I do not see how the addition of this request for not altering the product 
name by renaming it something else is in contradiction with the GPL. The way 
I read the GPL, it would still be possible to create a new program that 
contained reiser4 code and call it something else as long as the code was 
free. All it appears that is being asked is to not change the name of the 
product itself. This is the moral and right thing to do. The GPL licence also 
makes its intent and purpose clear in the following statement

##
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your 
rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the 
right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on 
the Program. 
##

Nothing in what Hans has requested would restrict the distribution of 
derivative or collective works based on the program. This is what the GPL is 
in essence trying to exercise control over eg to distribute derivative or 
collective works. As it states it does not have the intention to claim rights 
or contest the rights of the person/people who wrote the program. I would 
seem to think that if you strip credits and rename the actual product itself, 
eg NOT a derivitave work then you are taking the rights away from the person 
who wrote it.

Anyway apart from the technical aspect I believe there is a more fundamental 
issue that should not be swept under the carpet and this is that it is clear 
that people are prepared to essentially exploit the hardwork of other people 
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.

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. If people do not feel heard and do not feel 
that their contribution is essentially meaningful then it takes away one of 
the biggest motivations for releasing their hard work as Free Software.


Thankyou
And by the way if I could spell I would have spelt it right in the first 
place.

Thankyou
Michael Milverton

-- 
GNU/Linux: Secure, Stable, Free
Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


pgprSsnplH1iG.pgp
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Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-04-30 17:26:50 +0100 Michael Milverton 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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? 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.


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?


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 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.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jeremy Hankins]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Jeremy Hankins wrote:

>> Exactly: we offer no alternative.  This is not a disagreement about
>> which method of ensuring attribution is correct and acceptable, but a
>> disagreement about whether or not it is appropriate to force
>> attribution according to some particular standard.
>> 
>> It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push
>> whatever social agenda you wish with your software license -- but
>> debian-legal's position is that that will make the license non-free.
>> If you wish to require that it not be used in nuclear facilities,
>> fine: non-free.  If you require that people who use the software
>> spend a moment to think about the plight of the homeless, fine:
>> non-free.  Just as, when you require attribution in a particular
>> format and with a particular text, that's fine, but non-free.
>
> Did you say this as an official debian spokesperson?

Certainly not.  On the other hand, official debian spokespersons are
rather uncommon beasts, and generally unnecessary.  This is, however, my
perception (based on my years participating on the list) of the
consensus on debian-legal, and I'd be quite surprised if folks on d-l
disagreed.

Maybe you could explain what you would want an official statement for?
Most likely, whatever it is, we can find a way to achieve it.  Like many
groups, especially in the free software world, Debian has its own
structures and ways of getting things done.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:




 Just as, when you
require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
that's fine, but non-free.
   

Actually, I would be happy to use language not requiring a particular 
format but requiring it to be equally prominent and extensive for all 
persons credited at the end of any changes to it.


Hmm, I should change the anti-plagiarism license accordingly, as that 
makes sense.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Michael, you are much more eloquent than I am.  Thanks for understanding.

Hans

Michael Milverton wrote:


Is this the licencing in question?

###
Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits such as by creating
a front end that hides my credits from the user or renaming mkreiser4
to mkyourcompanyfs or even just make_filesystem, without my
permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
fair, ask.  (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)

Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
choice.
###

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. 

The way I read the GPL is that it is essentially giving you the freedom to 
copy change and modify the code as long you pass this freedom along.


I do not see how the addition of this request for not altering the product 
name by renaming it something else is in contradiction with the GPL. The way 
I read the GPL, it would still be possible to create a new program that 
contained reiser4 code and call it something else as long as the code was 
free. All it appears that is being asked is to not change the name of the 
product itself. This is the moral and right thing to do. The GPL licence also 
makes its intent and purpose clear in the following statement


##
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your 
rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the 
right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on 
the Program. 
##


Nothing in what Hans has requested would restrict the distribution of 
derivative or collective works based on the program. This is what the GPL is 
in essence trying to exercise control over eg to distribute derivative or 
collective works. As it states it does not have the intention to claim rights 
or contest the rights of the person/people who wrote the program. I would 
seem to think that if you strip credits and rename the actual product itself, 
eg NOT a derivitave work then you are taking the rights away from the person 
who wrote it.


Anyway apart from the technical aspect I believe there is a more fundamental 
issue that should not be swept under the carpet and this is that it is clear 
that people are prepared to essentially exploit the hardwork of other people 
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.


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. If people do not feel heard and do not feel 
that their contribution is essentially meaningful then it takes away one of 
the biggest motivations for releasing their hard work as Free Software.



Thankyou
And by the way if I could spell I would have spelt it right in the first 
place.


Thankyou
Michael Milverton

 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[David Masover]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1


| It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever
| social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's
| position is that that will make the license non-free.  If you wish to
| require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free.  If
| you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think
| about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free.  Just as, when you
| require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
| that's fine, but non-free.

This seems entirely too black-and-white to me.  If a license for
commercial software requires me to purchase a copy of it and only run
one copy at a time, on one machine at a time, that's acceptable to me.
I would prefer that the license allow me to pirate at will, of course,
or that the source all be there and the license allows me to fork it.

Similarly, I am not willing to accept a license which requires me to
allow the company publishing the software to automatically update it at
any time, and to pretty much do whatever they want to my machine with no
liability.  I am also not willing to accept a license which requires me
to license all works produced by the software to them.

Basically, by having "free" and "non-free", you lump everything together
into "free" as in absolutely, strictly, lilly-white, no-strings-attached
freedom, while "non-free" covers everything from reiser (free, as above,
with the restriction that there must be attribution) to microsoft (you
pay a huge license fee and basically sign away your soul).

Even if you don't think Microsoft is as evil as that, I still think it
would be a personal insult to Hans and everyone involved if anyone
called them a huge, faceless corporation.

I use Gentoo, personally, but one of my favorite things about debian is
that I can choose a level of stability -- from "stable but 5-10 years
old" to "this WILL break your computer", _including_ things in between
such as "don't trust your life savings to it, but we've never seen it
break" and "this is slightly bleeding-edge, but people have gotten it to
work".  I think there should be a similar option with licenses -- from
"free" to "microsoft", including things in between such as djb or reiser
style licenses.

Right now, there's only "free" and "non-free".  If I am human and sane,
my _only_ choice is probably "non-free" anyway.

If this has already been discussed, please point me to some archive to
read about it.
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Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

MJ Ray wrote:

On 2004-04-30 17:26:50 +0100 Michael Milverton 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.


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.



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?


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


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

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Putting Stallman's (or FSF's) work in the non-free section of your
> distribution is the lack of respect and gratitude that I speak of.

That perhaps is unfortunate, but we have expended extreme amounts of
effort in attempting to get both yourself and the FSF to consider
licensing there works in a manner consistent with the ideals of the
free software movement and Debian's own Social Contract and DFSG.

I hope you can see that it is a measure of our respect that we have
expended this effort instead of merely leaving these works in
non-free.[1]

> This happens due to peer reviewed journals in science.

It happens even in journals that are not peer reviewed, and merely
editor reviewed, because it is the way that the broader scientific
community expects people to behave.

> In free software there is no such social mechanism affecting RedHat
> and preventing them from removing the k from all the kde programs.

Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.

This is no different than what happens when someone fails to properly
attribute in a scientific journal. The community at large complains,
and the problem is dealt with, or at least made public.

[Finally, Debian isn't in the business of marketing at all. We are
interested in producing the best Free operating system(s) possible,
but aren't (in general) particularly worried about how many people
actually use Debian. We take the "If you build it, they will come"
approach.]

> you already did, you removed the credits from ReiserFS (none of
> which are credits for me, please keep that in mind, I do not take
> this stand for my personal benefit, my name is on the filesystem and
> that is more than enough credit for me).

The patch that you're refering to is currently not even applied. What
it actually did was add a -quiet option to suppress the outputing of
the DARPA sponsorship message.

Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.

> What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?

Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs. We follow
copyright, and almost always follow author and copyright holder
requests with respect to their work.

> the end user is not the issue, I think the current phrasing even
> defines that the end user can remove them.

Yes, but in order for the work to be free, the end user must also be
capable of distributing his or her modifications.


Don Armstrong

1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to work
on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion, and Debian is
itself comitted to doing it's utmost to bring works to a state where
they can be freely included in Debian.
-- 
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Stewart Smith wrote:
> It doesn't "add", it clarifies. i.e. if you build a clustered file
> system that does stuff specific to reiserfs (e.g. use the reiser4
> syscall), then that will be considered a derived work, and must be
> distributable under the GPL.

The clarification really isn't important. What is important is whether
or not a work is a derivative work.

> Think of it in the same light as the clarification in the kernel's
> copy of the GPL saying that userspace programs aren't
> derived. except here it's the other way around.

It is quite acceptable to remove a subset of (possibly) derived works
from the set of derived works, because in that case you are granting
additional permisions. It is not acceptable to add an additional set
of works which are not derived works to the set of works that are
derived works.

As a final note, the GPL + additional restrictions is in itself,
incompatible with other GPLed works. It is only the GPL + additional
permisions (or the GPL itself) which is compatible with other GPLed
works.


Don Armstrong

-- 
A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very
easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over
expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without
discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the
syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors
are an abundant source of gain.
 -- Anatole France

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hubert Chan]

> "David" == David Masover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

[...]

David> Basically, by having "free" and "non-free", you lump everything
David> together into "free" as in absolutely, strictly, lilly-white,
David> no-strings-attached freedom, while "non-free" covers everything
David> from reiser (free, as above, with the restriction that there must
David> be attribution) to microsoft (you pay a huge license fee and
David> basically sign away your soul).

Actually, things Microsoft would most likely not even get into
non-free.  Things in non-free must still be freely distributable, which
most Microsoft things are not.

So there is "free", "non-free", and "not-even-packaged-because-we-can't-
distribute-it".

Also, non-free is technically not a part of Debian -- it is only
maintained as a convenience to users.  Putting something in non-free
basically means, "we can't put this into Debian proper because it
conflicts with our Social Contract, but we recognize that users may
still want to use it."

-- 
Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA
Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7  5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA
Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net.   Encrypted e-mail preferred.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 06:34:11PM +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 05:32, Domenico Andreoli wrote:
> > > Also, a clustering file system built to work on top of this file
> > > system shall be considered a derivative work for the purposes of
> > > interpreting the GPL license granted herein.  Plugins are also to be
> > > considered derivative works.  Share code or pay money, we give you the
> > > choice.

> > Surely a license cannot add anything to the set of derived works (if
> > the other work is not derived, the license obviously doesn't apply to
> > it and hence never gets to say it is derived; if it is, it is even
> > without the license saying so). However I believe -legal has not
> > considered text like this a problem before (I might be wrong though).

> It doesn't "add", it clarifies. i.e. if you build a clustered file
> system that does stuff specific to reiserfs (e.g. use the reiser4
> syscall), then that will be considered a derived work, and must be
> distributable under the GPL.

> Sure, you could go to court and argue that it isn't - but namesys have a
> clear clarification of what they consider, so I hope your lawyer is good
> :)

The term "derivative work" in the GPL is defined by copyright law and
case law.  Any author is free to use a different definition in his
license, but such a license is no longer congruent with the GPL.  If
the intent here is "these things are defined to be derivative works for
the purpose of this license" rather than "you are warned that we will
regard these things as derivative works when deciding whether to sue
you", then Hans Reiser has no legal authority to make such a definition
change on behalf of *other* copyright holders.  This is why, if a work
made available under this "clarified" GPL license requires code
copyrighted by others who released it under an unmodified GPL license,
Debian must regard that work as undistributable (at least in binary
form) without explicit consent from the other copyright holders.

I'm not sure what works are being distributed under this clarified
license, though, or what their status is as derivative works, so this
may not actually be an issue.

In any case, no one is contesting Hans Reiser's right to make such a
license clarification for his own code; the only question is what the
implications are for Debian's continued distribution of it.

> Think of it in the same light as the clarification in the kernel's copy
> of the GPL saying that userspace programs aren't derived. except here
> it's the other way around.

This is an additional license *grant*, and is therefore not equivalent
to what is discussed above.  The GPL is always compatible with *more*
permissive licenses.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Humberto Massa]

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
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 05:33:51PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> Jeremy Hankins wrote:
> > Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > 
> > 
> >>What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
> >>None.  There is no alternative actually.
> > 
> > 
> > Exactly: we offer no alternative.  This is not a disagreement about
> > which method of ensuring attribution is correct and acceptable, but a
> > disagreement about whether or not it is appropriate to force attribution
> > according to some particular standard.
> > 
> > It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever
> > social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's
> > position is that that will make the license non-free.  If you wish to
> > require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free.  If
> > you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think
> > about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free.  Just as, when you
> > require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
> > that's fine, but non-free.

> Did you say this as an official debian spokesperson?

His statement is consistent with the consensus view among regular
participants of the debian-legal mailing list.

Thanks,
-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Steve Langasek wrote:




It doesn't "add", it clarifies. i.e. if you build a clustered file
system that does stuff specific to reiserfs (e.g. use the reiser4
syscall), then that will be considered a derived work, and must be
distributable under the GPL.
   



 


Sure, you could go to court and argue that it isn't - but namesys have a
clear clarification of what they consider, so I hope your lawyer is good
:)
   



The term "derivative work" in the GPL is defined

defined very loosely, as it indeed it must be, because it is inherently 
a loose concept.  There is, for instance, nothing in copyright law about 
linking



by copyright law and
case law.  

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-04-30 18:13:09 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


MJ Ray wrote:
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.


Whether this would help depends what you mean by "credits". Requiring 
particular wording and placement beyond what is required to attribute 
probably will be non-free.


[...] 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


We can argue about who has the most diplomatic language all day, but 
it would be more fun to fix these bugs.


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


I don't know what RedHat and KDE have to do with Debian and ReiserFS. 
I can look at them and I see red headwear and a cogged letter. Not 
really informative. "Various startups" also has little to do with 
debian, although if you discriminate against them just because they 
are startups, that's probably going to be non-free too.


Back to the topic: copyright infringement is copyright infringement. 
We don't want to infringe your copyright and if we do so, it is a 
serious bug to be fixed. See 
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-04-30 18:07:08 +0100 David Masover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

| require attribution in a particular format and with a particular 
text,

| that's fine, but non-free.
This seems entirely too black-and-white to me.


Fine, go debate it somewhere. This is off-topic for debian-legal and 
unwelcome because we have other work to do.


You failed to attribute the previous author. I hope they take a 
liberal view of your copyright infringement, or that you acted within 
your state's "fair use" laws. I still think it's a bit rude of you.


gentoo had no way to choose between licences beyond reading ebuilds, 
last I saw. A generally cavalier attitude to copyright means I no 
longer have any gentoo systems here.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

MJ Ray wrote:



I don't know what RedHat and KDE have to do with Debian and ReiserFS. 
I can look at them and I see red headwear and a cogged letter. Not 
really informative. "Various startups" also has little to do with 
debian, although if you discriminate against them just because they 
are startups, that's probably going to be non-free too.


I have to use one license that works for all users, and that means that 
I have to use the same license for people who don't want to attribute as 
I use for those who do.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Who the hell do you think you are to use market leveraging to force 
developers to use licenses they don't want that leave them exposed to 
dangers that endanger them not you? 

Have you expended 2-3 million dollars and a decade of your life only to 
find yourself 100,000 dollars in debt and returned to having a day job 
to support the other programmers on the project?  Without knowing you, 
somehow I doubt it. Who do you think you are to try to close me off from 
raising money by using the radical notion of publicly thanking those who 
give it?   Frankly, I don't advise anyone to follow my path: sure the 
software works, and people know my name, but the economics are miserable 
and unsuitable for responsible family raising, and reputation does 
little for you if you never have time to socialize.


You are trying to create a new rigid orthodoxy to close off license 
experimentation (long before we have licenses that work well), and like 
most groups who create such orthodoxies, you are eager to oppress those 
who do not conform to things you do not deeply understand.


I hope the FSF sticks to the GFDL and eventually makes GPL V3 resemble 
it.  As long as the FSF docs are debian non-free, debian non-free is not 
going to be something serious in the eyes of most.


Don Armstrong wrote:



It happens even in journals that are not peer reviewed, and merely
editor reviewed, because it is the way that the broader scientific
community expects people to behave.
 


There is no such expectation of Linux distros.

 


In free software there is no such social mechanism affecting RedHat
and preventing them from removing the k from all the kde programs.
   



Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.
 

They did it and nothing happened to them (except of course that XFree86 
4.0 changed its license, which is the only way developers can 
effectively respond to such conduct).


 



The patch that you're refering to is currently not even applied. What
it actually did was add a -quiet option to suppress the outputing of
the DARPA sponsorship message.
 


and what made you think it was your place to do that?

In a democracy, funding programs which are not known by the public to 
have provided much benefit get their funding cut. (When the democracy 
works well, what happens when it does not is off-topic.)



Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
 

oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of the 
moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.


 


What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
   



Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs.

It requires not removing the copyright notice which usually mentions the 
copyright holder is (me), and you know, I don't really fancy changing 
the mount type to "mount -t copyrighthansreiser2001200220032004 /dev/hda 
/home".  Everyone else but me gets completely shafted.



We follow
copyright, and almost always follow author and copyright holder
requests with respect to their work.

 


the end user is not the issue, I think the current phrasing even
defines that the end user can remove them.
   



Yes, but in order for the work to be free, the end user must also be
capable of distributing his or her modifications.


Don Armstrong

1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to work
on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion,


It isn't your place to force a license on software you did not write.


and Debian is
itself comitted to doing it's utmost to bring works to a state where
they can be freely included in Debian.
 

Well, I hope that we can find some means for being well and effectively 
integrated into the non-free section.  That would make me happy. 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Don Armstrong]

On Sun, 02 May 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Who the hell do you think you are to use market leveraging to force
> developers to use licenses they don't want that leave them exposed
> to dangers that endanger them not you?

Could the personal attacks please be toned down?

We aren't in the business of forcing developers to do anything.
Developers make their own decisions on how their work is licensed, and
are quite free to make their work available in a proprietary product,
shareware, or freeware. Debian has freely chosen not to be involved
with distributing such works for various reasons.

> Don Armstrong wrote:
> >The patch that you're refering to is currently not even
> >applied. What it actually did was add a -quiet option to suppress
> >the outputing of the DARPA sponsorship message.
> 
> and what made you think it was your place to do that?

My place? I'm not the one who applied it. Presumably it was applied
because an end user requested that it be applied. Clearly it's
perfectly reasonable to have an option for a program that enables it
to be used in non-interactive ways. Would you object to us having a
shell that allows users to do the equivalent of "foo > /dev/null"?

> In a democracy, funding programs which are not known by the public
> to have provided much benefit get their funding cut.

Probably, but I fail to see how allowing the user to turn off the
DARPA message decreases the end user's knowledge of who funded it.

> >Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
> >in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
>
> oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of
> the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.

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]
 
> >Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs.
>
> It requires not removing the copyright notice which usually mentions
> the copyright holder is (me), and you know, I don't really fancy
> changing the mount type to "mount -t
> copyrighthansreiser2001200220032004 /dev/hda /home".  Everyone else
> but me gets completely shafted.

Uh, that wouldn't be a proper copyright notice. Copyright notices have
a specific place in Debian, and are always placed there. [They are
also often included in the --version output for most programs.]

Furthermore, we expect copyright notices to also indicate the terms
under which they are (or are not) licensed.

> >1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to
> >work on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion,
> 
> It isn't your place to force a license on software you did not
> write.

I *CANNOT* force a license on software that I do not own the copyright
to.[2] To claim that I am (or have) is reprehensible. This is in
effect claiming that I (in my capacity as an individual!) have
extorted (or blackmailed) the FSF. I have done no such thing, nor have
any other members of the GFDL committee.


Don Armstrong

1: For those of you unfamiliar with journal articles, the funding
grant number is generally included at the very end of the article
before the references in a normal font size. [This is also where
acknowledgements (like my major professor's to Dr. Smirnoff) are
generally placed.]
2: At least not without committing a felony and a extreme breech of
my personal ethics.
-- 
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong
 -- Chris Torek

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin List-Petersen]

On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:55, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > >Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
> > >in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
> > oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of
> > the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.

I don't know what you are reading once you've installed a new program on
your system, but the README, README.Debian and the man-pages are for me
usually the FIRST place, since it might hold valuable information and
safe me the trouble, which i may have, if i didn't had read it.

So, if you know somebody (including yourself) that doesn't do it I'm
really in doubt about the security of your system. There is actually
useful information in there.

/Martin
--
The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary two;
Or else the other way around.
I'm never sure.  Are you?
-- Ogden Nash

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Don Armstrong wrote:



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]
 

funding agencies are always mentioned on the original article but not 
the citations of them, not sure what your point is?


I have never seen a journal reproduce another journal's article while 
deleting the mention of the funding agency.  That kind of abuse seems 
reserved for linux distros to practice.




 


Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs.
 


It requires not removing the copyright notice which usually mentions
the copyright holder is (me), and you know, I don't really fancy
changing the mount type to "mount -t
copyrighthansreiser2001200220032004 /dev/hda /home".  Everyone else
but me gets completely shafted.
   



Uh, that wouldn't be a proper copyright notice.


Legally it most certainly would be.


Copyright notices have
a specific place in Debian, and are always placed there.


Moving them would violate the law.


[They are
also often included in the --version output for most programs.]

Furthermore, we expect copyright notices to also indicate the terms
under which they are (or are not) licensed.
 


The law does not require this, nor does the GPL.

 


1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to
work on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion,
 


It isn't your place to force a license on software you did not
write.
   



I *CANNOT* force a license on software that I do not own the copyright
to.[2] To claim that I am (or have) is reprehensible. This is in
effect claiming that I (in my capacity as an individual!) have
extorted (or blackmailed) the FSF. I have done no such thing, nor have
any other members of the GFDL committee.
 

You as a group are attempting to coerce using the market leverage that 
Debian genuinely does possess and seems willing and aggressively eager 
to use.  Are you going to claim that market leverage is not a very real 
and potent form of coercion? 

Stallman is experimenting with methods of requiring crediting, and you 
are getting in the way of an effort to research and test new solutions 
to real problems in current licensing techniques which you are not 
concerned about because they put persons other than you and your 
committee at risk.  My experiments (slightly different from Stallmans 
and I think slightly more to the point than documentation licensing) are 
also being frustrated by you.


In regards to font size and all that, I have already said that it is 
sufficient for me if the credits are equally prominent, and retain their 
wording, and you are free to change their graphical presentation subject 
to that.  Sending them to /dev/null does not make them equally prominent 
compared to the original form.  I am quite willing to cooperate on all 
matters of finessing things so that installs are smooth and elegant, 
etc., and to develop any improved licensing wording that would enhance 
freedom of installer writers while retaining the presentation of the 
credits.  Actually, I think that requiring that the credits be equally 
prominent and retain their wording is quite flexible for that purpose 
already, but please inform me if you see an issue I missed.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Martin List-Petersen wrote:


On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:55, Don Armstrong wrote:
 


Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
   


oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of
the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.
 



I don't know what you are reading once you've installed a new program on
your system, but the README, README.Debian and the man-pages are for me
usually the FIRST place, since it might hold valuable information and
safe me the trouble, which i may have, if i didn't had read it.
 

I never read these (except the man pages) unless the install fails in 
some way (I read the NVIDIA ones many times), and neither do 99% of 
real users, including 99% of reiserfs users.  As a user, I can handle 
the distro flashing information on my screen as it installs and I can 
read that, or printing credits when I select a particular package for 
the install, and I can handle a tool printing credits when it starts up 
(ala mkreiser4) for me to read, but going through a list of 3000 
packages after the install completes and reading their readmes and 
credits files just ain't gonna happen.


As a developer, I can probably be talked out of anything that makes the 
install slower or more awkward or adds more clicks.  If there is another 
paradigm in place for displaying info about the packages during the 
install (I encourage you to have one), I would most likely be happy to 
conform to that.



So, if you know somebody (including yourself) that doesn't do it I'm
really in doubt about the security of your system. There is actually
useful information in there.

/Martin
--
The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary two;
Or else the other way around.
I'm never sure.  Are you?
   -- Ogden Nash




 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Markus Törnqvist wrote:



 


Probably, but I fail to see how allowing the user to turn off the
DARPA message decreases the end user's knowledge of who funded it.
   



Credits unread are credits unknown.
 

The problem is not the end user, the problem is that distros do it 
without the end user ever knowing that there was something to turn off.




 


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.

 

There is nothing offensive about them.  We reduced them to a random 
credit, rather than an exhaustive credit like they were.  Now users 
might actually take the time to read them.;-)

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin List-Petersen]

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 18:04, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Martin List-Petersen wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:55, Don Armstrong wrote:
> >  
> >
> Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
> in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
> 
> 
> >>>oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of
> >>>the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.
> >>>  
> >>>
> >
> >I don't know what you are reading once you've installed a new program on
> >your system, but the README, README.Debian and the man-pages are for me
> >usually the FIRST place, since it might hold valuable information and
> >safe me the trouble, which i may have, if i didn't had read it.
> >  
> >
> I never read these (except the man pages) unless the install fails in 
> some way (I read the NVIDIA ones many times), and neither do 99% of 
> real users, including 99% of reiserfs users.  As a user, I can handle 
> the distro flashing information on my screen as it installs and I can 
> read that, or printing credits when I select a particular package for 
> the install, and I can handle a tool printing credits when it starts up 
> (ala mkreiser4) for me to read, but going through a list of 3000 
> packages after the install completes and reading their readmes and 
> credits files just ain't gonna happen.

Probably not for each and every after the installation of your operating
system, but let's take mkreiserfs. Everyone has at some point asked
himself why there are two formats to choose (3.5 and 3.6)

Thats something you definatly go for the man pages or readme for.

And if you install packages (single) at a later time, you would often go
for the README. Same situation is, if you are installing from source.

> As a developer, I can probably be talked out of anything that makes the 
> install slower or more awkward or adds more clicks.  If there is another 
> paradigm in place for displaying info about the packages during the 
> install (I encourage you to have one), I would most likely be happy to 
> conform to that.

I think actually showing credit's, README's and other important things during 
install is exactly
the right way of going, instead of showing them any time you are using the 
software.

My personal opinion (and i speak only for myself here) would be to have it come 
up with the default
screen (as any Debian package does, if there is something important) and that 
might include the credits.
You would just have to accept, that this popup can be disabled for automatic 
install, because an system
administrator, that anyway saw your credits the first time he installed it, 
does want to hit enter a
couple of times during unattended (as the name says) install.

/Martin
--
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.  Second marriage is 
the triumph of hope over experience.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Martin List-Petersen wrote:


On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 18:04, Hans Reiser wrote:
 


Martin List-Petersen wrote:

   


On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:55, Don Armstrong wrote:


 


Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
  

   


oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of
the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.


 


I don't know what you are reading once you've installed a new program on
your system, but the README, README.Debian and the man-pages are for me
usually the FIRST place, since it might hold valuable information and
safe me the trouble, which i may have, if i didn't had read it.


 

I never read these (except the man pages) unless the install fails in 
some way (I read the NVIDIA ones many times), and neither do 99% of 
real users, including 99% of reiserfs users.  As a user, I can handle 
the distro flashing information on my screen as it installs and I can 
read that, or printing credits when I select a particular package for 
the install, and I can handle a tool printing credits when it starts up 
(ala mkreiser4) for me to read, but going through a list of 3000 
packages after the install completes and reading their readmes and 
credits files just ain't gonna happen.
   



Probably not for each and every after the installation of your operating
system, but let's take mkreiserfs. Everyone has at some point asked
himself why there are two formats to choose (3.5 and 3.6)

Thats something you definatly go for the man pages or readme for.

And if you install packages (single) at a later time, you would often go
for the README. Same situation is, if you are installing from source.

 

As a developer, I can probably be talked out of anything that makes the 
install slower or more awkward or adds more clicks.  If there is another 
paradigm in place for displaying info about the packages during the 
install (I encourage you to have one), I would most likely be happy to 
conform to that.
   



I think actually showing credit's, README's and other important things during 
install is exactly
the right way of going, instead of showing them any time you are using the 
software.
 

well, okay, I can be talked into that, though with random credits, 
repetition is not repetition



My personal opinion (and i speak only for myself here) would be to have it come 
up with the default
screen (as any Debian package does, if there is something important) and that 
might include the credits.
You would just have to accept, that this popup can be disabled for automatic 
install, because an system
administrator, that anyway saw your credits the first time he installed it, 
does want to hit enter a
couple of times during unattended (as the name says) install.
 



Oh, I don't think the sysadmin or user should have to hit enter at all 
during any install. credits should be displayed while packages are 
installing or bitmap blocks are being zeroed or


and an unattended machine should install without any clicks at all once 
the install starts up


If Debian would pro-actively find effective and reasonably ways to 
credit authors, then the tension would come out of this situation  
The problem is when they discuss whether I would be formally satisfied 
if the credits go to /dev/null.


Hans

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Markus Törnqvist wrote:


On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 10:11:29AM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:

 


Credits unread are credits unknown.
 

The problem is not the end user, the problem is that distros do it 
without the end user ever knowing that there was something to turn off.
   



Mayhaps. But it's never that easy.

Debian could quite easily have a preinstall screen with all the credits,
but that would have to replace the mandatory showing of the credits.
That's, as far as I'd guess, not an option, because the credits would be
removed.
 

No, that certainly is an option.  Relocating the credits to somewhere 
reasonable for a particular installer is just fine with me.



The credits could also go to /dev/null with a preinstall screen, but that
would not fix the non-free issue.

Also, if every software showed their credits, there would easily be a ton
of them.

This is bad why?  They could be interesting for users to read while the 
install proceeds.



But many modules do show some credits when inserted.

I don't know, I don't have an answer to this.

Except that I think it's absurd that someone would knowingly and willingly
even want to suppress credits if they're put there. Especially in a case
where the developer has tried to minimize them.
 


It is absurd, but it is reality.


That's still not an answer, though.

 

There is nothing offensive about them.  We reduced them to a random 
credit, rather than an exhaustive credit like they were.  Now users 
might actually take the time to read them.;-)
   



Problem is, might be as in my case, that I don't remember them...
But when information is spewed on my screen, I tend to read it, but how
much is a credit unremembered worth?
 


Well, hey, making the credits memorable is up to us, and if we fail we fail.


Why is it so difficult to try to argue both sides, because both sides have
good points?

What if Debian just accepted that a clause forbidding removal of credits
set by the copyright holder is not limiting freedom?

I mean, it's not THAT major an issue. If people think the credits suck,
they'll stick them up their /dev/null. So it's in the best interest of the
developer to make sure they don't annoy anyone. And people should have the
right to be credited fairly for their work if they want to.

 


Thanks for understanding.

RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Burnes, James]

Is there any way to do an MD5 of either (1) each module in a software
subsystem or (2) each software version and then have a central registry
where interested developers and users can go to see the credits?

That way you could simply do an MD5 of the current binary and use that
fingerprint to see who wrote and contributed to it.  Much like the CDDB
database takes a track/time fingerprint of CD's and then tells you which
songs and artist made the CD.

This could be a kind of historical registry for developers.  If they
want to they can use it to demonstrate to potential employers,
contractors and/or new IPOs to prove their contributions.

It might also be invaluable to eventual science historians that would
like to research the individuals contributing to certain important
systems.

That would seem to be the scalable way to do it.  You could also include
the credits in the source code, but not require them to be duplicated in
in GPL derived works.

I'm sure there are angles I haven't thought of since I'm running on 3
hours sleep.  Maybe a way to look at binary diffs and say, "this is 95%
similar to ReiserFS Version 4.3, would you like to view the credits for
this system?"

Or something like that.

jim burnes
security engineer
great-west, denver
 

> -Original Message-
> From: Hans Reiser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 11:05 AM
> To: Martin List-Petersen
> Cc: Don Armstrong; debian-legal@lists.debian.org; reiserfs-
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?
> 
> Martin List-Petersen wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:55, Don Armstrong wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>>Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my
knowledge)
> >>>>in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side
of
> >>>the moon  a credit read by no one has no meaning.
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >I don't know what you are reading once you've installed a new program
on
> >your system, but the README, README.Debian and the man-pages are for
me
> >usually the FIRST place, since it might hold valuable information and
> >safe me the trouble, which i may have, if i didn't had read it.
> >
> >
> I never read these (except the man pages) unless the install fails in
> some way (I read the NVIDIA ones many times), and neither do 99%
of
> real users, including 99% of reiserfs users.  As a user, I can handle
> the distro flashing information on my screen as it installs and I can
> read that, or printing credits when I select a particular package for
> the install, and I can handle a tool printing credits when it starts
up
> (ala mkreiser4) for me to read, but going through a list of 3000
> packages after the install completes and reading their readmes and
> credits files just ain't gonna happen.
> 
> As a developer, I can probably be talked out of anything that makes
the
> install slower or more awkward or adds more clicks.  If there is
another
> paradigm in place for displaying info about the packages during the
> install (I encourage you to have one), I would most likely be happy to
> conform to that.
> 
> >So, if you know somebody (including yourself) that doesn't do it I'm
> >really in doubt about the security of your system. There is actually
> >useful information in there.
> >
> >/Martin
> >--
> >The camel has a single hump;
> >The dromedary two;
> >Or else the other way around.
> >I'm never sure.  Are you?
> >-- Ogden Nash
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Burnes, James wrote:


Is there any way to do an MD5 of either (1) each module in a software
subsystem or (2) each software version and then have a central registry
where interested developers and users can go to see the credits?

 

Credits that users must take action to see are not effective credits. No 
one will look at them.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Mahesh T. Pai]

Hans Reiser said on Mon, May 03, 2004 at 09:35:39AM -0700,:

 > Stallman is experimenting with methods of requiring crediting,

Huh? After terming the BSD-with advertising-clause license  `obnoxious'? 
 
 > credits.   Actually, I  think that  requiring that  the  credits be
 > equally prominent  and retain their  wording is quite  flexible for
 > that purpose  already, but please inform  me if you see  an issue I
 > missed.

I'm *not* a developer. 
 
As a  user, I will find it  extremely inconvenient to be  faced with a
load of messages *anytime*, boot, or whatever. 

I hope you will appreciate that  most distros are trying their best to
mask the  boot messages from  users, because users  do not want  to be
concerned  with all  those mess(ages).  How  else do  you expect  that
credits should be displayed? 

-- 
+~+
  
  Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M.,   
  'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road,   
  Ernakulam, Cochin-682018,   
  Kerala, India.  
  
  http://paivakil.port5.com 
  
+~+

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Chris Dukes]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 08:49:10PM +0300, Markus Törnqvist wrote:
[SNEEPAGE]
Perhaps this is overly cynical but...
In this day and age people only seem to care about proper attribution
when either
1) Looking for another garbage novel to read.
2) Looking for someone to sue.

The former seems to be covered by having the author's name in bigger
type than the title of the novel.
The latter, it doesn't matter how well the credits are buried, the
presumed targets will be served.
So as a compromise can we have
hansreiserfs* as the prefix on all packages.
HANSREISER as the prefix on all executables, kernel symbols, fstypes...
Frequent use of bold and blink for the text HANS REISER as well.

I don't know about other folks, but the credits filling my terminal
windows and logs get first dibs on catching the blame on whatever
may be going wrong with my computer.
-- 
Chris Dukes
Been there, done that, got the slightly-charred t-shirt. -- Crowder

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jens Peter Secher]

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Markus Törnqvist wrote:
>
> > Also, if every software showed their credits, there would easily be
> > a ton of them.
> >
> This is bad why?  They could be interesting for users to read while
> the install proceeds.

Indeed, it would be far more interesting to read credits instead of a
boring list of URIs.

Hmm, come to think of it, if the credits were simply scrolled up with
every package installed, the length of each individual credit would
naturally be limited, and thus probably avoid excessively long credits.

Would that be a working solution?
-- 
Jens Peter Secher
_DD6A 05B0 174E BFB2 D4D9 B52E 0EE5 978A FE63 E8A1 jpsecher get2net dk_

RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin List-Petersen]

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 18:41, Burnes, James wrote:
> Is there any way to do an MD5 of either (1) each module in a software
> subsystem or (2) each software version and then have a central registry
> where interested developers and users can go to see the credits?
>
> That way you could simply do an MD5 of the current binary and use that
> fingerprint to see who wrote and contributed to it.  Much like the CDDB
> database takes a track/time fingerprint of CD's and then tells you which
> songs and artist made the CD.

Not an option, since the software is distributed in source and the look
of the binary varies based on operating system, library version, the
compiler used etc.

Also that would prevent you from modifying the source.

Freedom gone and not redistributable within Debian.

Debian actually does do checksums on the packages, but that is for security and 
prove of
origin reasons.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
--
"Now we'll have to kill you."
-- Linus Torvalds

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Don Armstrong]

On Mon, 03 May 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
> I have never seen a journal reproduce another journal's article
> while deleting the mention of the funding agency.  That kind of
> abuse seems reserved for linux distros to practice.

Yes, but one of the reasons why they don't have to is because people
writing those journal articles don't place their funding agency at the
top of the article in 24 point font.[1]

> Moving them would violate the law.

No. Changing a copyright notice (in its legal effect) would violate
the law. Moving it would not. [Any more so than me moving moving these
journal articles on my desk is illegal.]

> The law does not require this, nor does the GPL.

If the license the work is licensed under is not specified, typically
immediatly after the copyright statement, then the copyright holder
has retained all rights granted by copyright. Thus, placing the work
under the GPL or any other license requires this.

> Are you going to claim that market leverage is not a very real and
> potent form of coercion?

If ReiserFS is concerned about its market share, it might be. But if
ReiserFS is developing Free Software, I'm not sure what market share
has to do with anything.

Debian has had its Free Software Guidelines for quite some time, and
has been enforcing them for longer than reiserfs has been in a stable
kernel. We have always applied them[2] to determine what we can and
cannot distribute. We apply them for various reasons, some of them
pragmatic, some of them dogmatic.

>  My experiments (slightly different from Stallmans and I think
> slightly more to the point than documentation licensing) are also
> being frustrated by you.

So then you think that Debian should ignore it's own Social Contract
because it is interfering with your license experimentation?


I have no idea if a Free Software license is what is right for
reiserfs. If it is, then you must be willing to allow modifications to
reiserfs in ways that you don't particularly like. If you are unable
to allow use or modifications that are abhorrent to you, then Free
Software is probably not right for reiserfs.

You can request that they respect your wishes, and most will do so.[3]
But to require that they respect your wishes is to begin the long
descent into the territory of software that is not Free.


Don Armstrong

1: Possibly because journal editors don't allow this, but I digress.
2: Well, since we've had them, anyway.
3: Assuming they're reasonable wishes (and people...)
-- 
There is no mechanical problem so difficult that it cannot be solved
by brute strength and ignorance.
 -- William's Law

http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Description: Digital signature

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Tim Donahue]

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 14:16, Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
> Hans Reiser said on Mon, May 03, 2004 at 09:35:39AM -0700,:
> 
>  > credits.   Actually, I  think that  requiring that  the  credits be
>  > equally prominent  and retain their  wording is quite  flexible for
>  > that purpose  already, but please inform  me if you see  an issue I
>  > missed.
> 
> I'm *not* a developer.
> 
> As a  user, I will find it  extremely inconvenient to be  faced with a
> load of messages *anytime*, boot, or whatever.
> 

As a systems administrator, I would have to agree with this,
*especially* when I am trying to debug a problem.  Perhaps a -q (or
--quiet, or whatever your poison is) option should be included by
default.  Then a request could be made that the quiet option not be
enabled by default by distributions.

Two other ideas that I personally wouldn't mind.  Insead of that crappy
marketing stuff that some distributions use (I will refrain from
mentioning names here.) perhaps a progress bar could be shown and we
could read the credits for the various software packages.  

My other thought was a welcome, or first use, message of some type. 
When I install OpenBSD, the first login includes a welcome message which
lists the software packages included in the base, some tips for where to
start, and it also has a list of developers.  Perhaps a welcome message
could be displayed the first time that one of the applications is used
(or it is displayed until the user disables that message).

Tim Donahue

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Brian Thomas Sniffen]

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Burnes, James wrote:
>
>>Is there any way to do an MD5 of either (1) each module in a software
>>subsystem or (2) each software version and then have a central registry
>>where interested developers and users can go to see the credits?
>>
> Credits that users must take action to see are not effective
> credits. No one will look at them.

So, then, you're trying to use your market leverage to ensure that
these messages are seen?

It seems that this is the basis of your experiment.  Perhaps a way
which would satisfy your imperative to credit your contributors and
satisfy Debian's self-imposed restrictions would be to separately
license various parts of the system.  For example, freely distribute
the reiserfs kernel modifications under the same GPL as the rest of
the kernel.  Distribute non-interactive command-line tools similarly.
For interactive tools, use something which Debian won't consider a
Free license -- the GNU GPLv2, with a clarification that you consider
the "appropriate notice" of section 2c to include all these credits at
this level of prominence.

You get your advertising for your contributors.

Debian gets free code.

The users enable non-free and have interactive tools, and see
advertisements.

The zealots who don't enable non-free will use the grungy
non-interactive tools, and see the credits reprinted in the
documentation.

Does this actually meet your needs?

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

This email spoke much about "forcing". To me, forcing is almost always 
compulsion. That's not really what Reiser or Debian can do to each 
other. The only thing I see that can be compelled is for Debian not to 
distribute Reiser's software at all, if it goes under totally 
no-copying terms.


On 2004-05-02 22:02:38 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Who the hell do you think you are to use market leveraging to force 
developers to use licenses they don't want that leave them exposed to 
dangers 
that endanger them not you?


Who the hell are you to use market leveraging to try to force 
developers to accept licences they don't want that leave their users 
exposed to dangers that endanger them not you?


Really, these linguistic pyrotechnics help no-one.

If you want big invariant adverts required by your copyright licence, 
go ahead. We will not force you to do otherwise, but you cannot force 
us to distribute your software. You could try to persuade us, but 
you've really not done well at that so far. Maybe we've not done well 
at persuading you, but I doubt you had an open mind at the start of 
this discussion, as you already picked that licence for some reason.


I shudder to think how much money-worth has been put into developing 
debian. Trying to intimidate us with the size of your wad seems 
unlikely to work.


You are trying to create a new rigid orthodoxy to close off license 
experimentation (long before we have licenses that work well), and 
like most 
groups who create such orthodoxies, you are eager to oppress those 
who do not 
conform to things you do not deeply understand.


Licence experimentation is cool and froody, but debian should be free 
to make its mind up about what is acceptable to it. They're getting 
quite practised at it now.


I don't want to oppress you. However, you are eager to oppress 
debian's users.


I hope the FSF sticks to the GFDL and eventually makes GPL V3 
resemble it. 


I hope they don't.


Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.
They did it and nothing happened to them (except of course that 
XFree86 4.0 
changed its license, which is the only way developers can effectively 
respond 
to such conduct).


OK, so say RedHat did bad. I don't use RedHat for years, which is the 
only way users can effectively respond. I plan to stop using XFree86 
because of its dumb developers who won't answer simple questions about 
the licence. I already don't use ReiserFS any more.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

MJ Ray wrote:

[at least 3 insults snipped]

>>> Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
>>> users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.
>
> On 2004-05-02 22:02:38 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> They did it and nothing happened to them (except of course that
>> XFree86 4.0 changed its license, which is the only way developers can
>> effectively respond to such conduct).
> 
> OK, so say RedHat did bad. I don't use RedHat for years, which is the
> only way users can effectively respond. I plan to stop using XFree86
> because of its dumb developers who won't answer simple questions about
 ^^^
Hey, can you do anything else but insult people?


> the licence. I already don't use ReiserFS any more.

That's your right. Nobody has disputed that.


Carl-Daniel

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Mon, 03 May 2004 09:58:30 +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Markus 
=?UNKNOWN?Q?T=F6rnqvist?=)  said:

> It's really quite a shame that the best distro around is so rigid
> as to not allow Reiser's minor, and understandable, addition in
> his licensing.

The idiomatic phrase for this is "slippery slope" - it's much easier (and
morally justifiable) to draw a hard line and and say "everybody on that
side of the line goes in non-free" without exceptions.  If you accept Hans'
"minor addition", then you get to fight the "but *my* minor addition isn't
much bigger than Hans', why can't *my* stuff go in free too?" fight for
every single package.

And I will advance the suggestion that the entire "We don't care how many users
we have, we will stick to the highest principles no matter what" philosophy is
a large part of *WHY* Debian is the sort of distribution it is.  Yes, they
probably *could* be less rigid about this issue.  But then they'd lose a large
part of what makes Debian be Debian, rather than some other distribution...

> Wouldn't mkfs -f > /dev/null be adequate suppression?

Redirecting to /dev/null at the time you *MOST* want to be paying very
close attention to everything that's output... Bad idea. :)


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Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Lewis Jardine]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:


MJ Ray wrote:

OK, so say RedHat did bad. I don't use RedHat for years, which is the
only way users can effectively respond. I plan to stop using XFree86
because of its dumb developers who won't answer simple questions about 

   ^^^
Hey, can you do anything else but insult people?




\Dumb\, a. [AS. dumb; akin to D. dom stupid, dumb, Sw. dumb, Goth. 
dumbs; cf. Gr. ? blind. See Deaf, and cf. Dummy.]


2. Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not accompanied by 
words; as, dumb show.


Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.


It would seem that in the case of XFree86, 'dumb' is neither insulting 
nor inaccurate :)


--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL IANADD

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-03 17:35:39 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Copyright notices have
a specific place in Debian, and are always placed there.

Moving them would violate the law.


What law?


Furthermore, we expect copyright notices to also indicate the terms
under which they are (or are not) licensed.

The law does not require this, nor does the GPL.


Clause 1 of the GPL requires notices of the GPL to remain AFAICT.

You as a group are attempting to coerce using the market leverage 
that Debian 
genuinely does possess and seems willing and aggressively eager to 
use.


And you as a person are attempting to use the market leverage that 
ReiserFS genuinely does possess... It's still not a very good forcing 
device.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-03 18:30:53 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

If Debian would pro-actively find effective and reasonably ways to 
credit 
authors, then the tension would come out of this situation


It is difficult to be pro-active when having to react to developers. 
Also, "reasonable" is a bit of a subjective term. I think crediting 
the reiserfs developers in the (hideable) version banner would be 
reasonable, but I know you disagree.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-03 22:53:05 +0100 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:



MJ Ray wrote:
because of its dumb developers who won't answer simple questions 
about

 ^^^
Hey, can you do anything else but insult people?


I'm not sure what you mean. I've reread the email and I'm surprised 
that you think there are "at least 3 insults" in it. I count one and 
that was an intentional illustration of the unnecessarily insulting 
language it was replying to.


  Dumb \Dumb\, a. [...]

 2. Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not
accompanied by words;

It seems an apt description of how some XFree86 developers reacted to 
questions. They went dumb. Other XFree86 developers were helpful, but 
they are not the reason I plan to stop using it, so I do not blame 
them.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-05-03 22:53:05 +0100 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>> MJ Ray wrote:
>>
>>> because of its dumb developers who won't answer simple questions about
>>
>>  ^^^
>> Hey, can you do anything else but insult people?
> 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean. I've reread the email and I'm surprised that
> you think there are "at least 3 insults" in it. I count one and that was
> an intentional illustration of the unnecessarily insulting language it
> was replying to.
> 
>   Dumb \Dumb\, a. [...]
> 
>  2. Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not
> accompanied by words;

I'm sorry to have misunderstood you. The meaning of dumb I was referring
to is slightly different.

Quoting from dictionary.reference.com:
--
dumb( P )
adj. dumb·er, dumb·est

1.a Lacking the power of speech. Used of animals and inanimate objects.
1.b Often Offensive. Incapable of using speech; mute. Used of humans. See
Usage Note at mute.
2. Temporarily speechless, as with shock or fear: I was dumb with disbelief.
3. Unwilling to speak; taciturn.
[...]
6. Conspicuously unintelligent; stupid: dumb officials; a dumb decision.
[...]
Our Living Language In ordinary spoken English, a sentence such as He is
dumb will be interpreted to mean “He is stupid” rather than “He lacks the
power of speech.” “Lacking the power of speech” is, however, the original
sense of the word, but it has been eclipsed by the meaning “stupid.”
--


> It seems an apt description of how some XFree86 developers reacted to
> questions. They went dumb. Other XFree86 developers were helpful, but
> they are not the reason I plan to stop using it, so I do not blame them.

I mistook your phrase "its dumb developers" as referring to all XFree86
developers. Now that you clarified it, it doesn't look like an insult
anymore.

Carl-Daniel

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Claus Färber]

MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb/wrote:
> Sadly, your "invariant section"-inspired changes to the GPL cause
> other problems, which seem similar to combining an ad-clause licence
> with the GPL.

Rememer that an "ad-clause" usually does not render a work non-free,
just incompatible with the GPL. Depending on the size of the ads, it can
be a practical problem or a usability problem, however.

Claus
-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-03 15:24:00 +0100 Claus Färber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Rememer that an "ad-clause" usually does not render a work non-free,
> just incompatible with the GPL. [...]

An "ad-clause" usually applies to documentation or advertising supplied with 
the software, not the software package itself, and only requires attribution 
not a large advert. It sails very close to the wind, but doesn't quite fall 
over.

-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Joel Baker]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 10:56:13AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-05-03 15:24:00 +0100 Claus Färber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> > Rememer that an "ad-clause" usually does not render a work non-free,
> > just incompatible with the GPL. [...]
>
> An "ad-clause" usually applies to documentation or advertising supplied
> with the software, not the software package itself, and only requires
> attribution not a large advert. It sails very close to the wind, but
> doesn't quite fall over.

And even then, some of us are willing to go to some fairly large amount of
effort to try to convince upstreams to switch to a license without one...
-- 
Joel Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,''`.
Debian GNU/kNetBSD(i386) porter  : :' :
 `. `'
http://nienna.lightbearer.com/ `-


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Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Markus Törnqvist wrote:


On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 10:35:12AM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:

 

No, that certainly is an option.  Relocating the credits to somewhere 
reasonable for a particular installer is just fine with me.
   



Let's see what the Debian people say about showing the complete credits
in the preinstall screen during interactive installation and scrolling
through them automatically in a non-interactive one, for example.

I think the response will be "but it's still non-free" :P

 


Also, if every software showed their credits, there would easily be a ton
of them.
 

This is bad why?  They could be interesting for users to read while the 
install proceeds.
   



I wouldn't mind it. However, it could get out of hand if we had
three-four-five screenfulls of credits during every boot. Then it's time
to /dev/null again...
 

Well, a really clever way of doing it would have a page describing what 
the program does with a little bit of credits at the bottom.


As a user, I am usually disappointed by how operating systems fail to 
take the opportunity to educate me while I wait for them to install.



Credits (as commercials and ads and stuff) should never defeat the purpose
of the entity of which they are a part.
 

I would really like Debian to understand the difference between credits 
and ads.  Credits describe someone's contribution to the project.  Ads 
describe some product for you to buy.  Very different things.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

You miss the point.  I get plenty of credit because of the filesystem 
name.  It is everybody else who gets shortchanged unless we print a 
randomly chosen 1 paragraph credit at mkreiser4 time.


Hans

Chris Dukes wrote:


On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 08:49:10PM +0300, Markus Törnqvist wrote:
[SNEEPAGE]
Perhaps this is overly cynical but...
In this day and age people only seem to care about proper attribution
when either
1) Looking for another garbage novel to read.
2) Looking for someone to sue.

The former seems to be covered by having the author's name in bigger
type than the title of the novel.
The latter, it doesn't matter how well the credits are buried, the
presumed targets will be served.
So as a compromise can we have
hansreiserfs* as the prefix on all packages.
HANSREISER as the prefix on all executables, kernel symbols, fstypes...
Frequent use of bold and blink for the text HANS REISER as well.

I don't know about other folks, but the credits filling my terminal
windows and logs get first dibs on catching the blame on whatever
may be going wrong with my computer.
 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:



 


It seems an apt description of how some XFree86 developers reacted to
questions. They went dumb. Other XFree86 developers were helpful, but
they are not the reason I plan to stop using it, so I do not blame them.
   

I understand why they lost interest in talking to persons who cannot 
grasp that distros removed mention of them from their man pages and this 
was wrong.


I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of 
changing licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I got a 
response.;-)


Hans

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-04 17:20:56 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I understand why they lost interest in talking to persons who cannot 
grasp 
that distros removed mention of them from their man pages and this 
was wrong.


That's actually irrelevant in that case. Their advertising clause is 
actually not the reason for it being non-free, as I understand it, 
although it does make it GPL-incompatible, which is a bit irritating.


Their licence requires extreme protection of their name as a 
condition, which seems unacceptable for free software. If I even 
mention in a factual review who holds the copyright to the software, I 
have probably failed the letter of the conditions.


It seems a little cruel of you to punish all users by taking your code 
non-free because you are not happy with some distributor actions. You 
should work with the distributors instead of accusing them of 
immorality as an opening tactic. That should be the last resort, not 
the first.


I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of 
changing 
licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I got a 
response.;-)


You seem to enjoy working against free software. I got some responses, 
too, as previously mentioned.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

There is a difference between free software and plagiarizable software.  
The two are orthogonal concepts.


Debian wants software to be both free and plagiarizable.  XFree86 and I 
want our software to be free but not plagiarizable.  In general, I want 
software to not be plagiarizable, as I think it works against the 
societal interest to not attribute accurately.  Saying that plagiarism 
is an important freedom is like saying assault is something you must be 
allowed to do if you are to be considered free.


Hans

MJ Ray wrote:


On 2004-05-04 17:20:56 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I understand why they lost interest in talking to persons who cannot 
grasp that distros removed mention of them from their man pages and 
this was wrong.



That's actually irrelevant in that case. Their advertising clause is 
actually not the reason for it being non-free, as I understand it, 
although it does make it GPL-incompatible, which is a bit irritating.


Their licence requires extreme protection of their name as a 
condition, which seems unacceptable for free software. If I even 
mention in a factual review who holds the copyright to the software, I 
have probably failed the letter of the conditions.


It seems a little cruel of you to punish all users by taking your code 
non-free because you are not happy with some distributor actions. You 
should work with the distributors instead of accusing them of 
immorality as an opening tactic. That should be the last resort, not 
the first.


I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of 
changing licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I got 
a response.;-)



You seem to enjoy working against free software. I got some responses, 
too, as previously mentioned.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-05-04 09:20]:
> I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of
> changing licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I got
> a response.;-)

I wonder if you're aware that virtually every distro is moving away
from XFree86.
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-04 18:02:28 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

There is a difference between free software and plagiarizable 
software.


There is a difference between free software and forced-advert 
software, too. There is also the difference between a duck.



Debian wants software to be both free and plagiarizable.


Debian has not expressed that view, to the best of my knowledge.

XFree86 and I want 
our software to be free but not plagiarizable.


Great! I look forward to you both fixing your licences.

In general, I want software 
to not be plagiarizable, as I think it works against the societal 
interest to 
not attribute accurately.


I agree.

Saying that plagiarism is an important freedom is 
like saying assault is something you must be allowed to do if you are 
to be 
considered free.


No-one has said that. You seem to be constructing straw men.

In case you missed it, the problem which makes XFree86's latest 
licence definitely non-free (not just GPL-incompatible) is independent 
of their advertising clause.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin Dickopp]

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> You miss the point.  I get plenty of credit because of the filesystem
> name.  It is everybody else who gets shortchanged unless we print a
> randomly chosen 1 paragraph credit at mkreiser4 time.

I'm not a Debian developer.  But I don't understand your earlier comment
about attribution in science in the light of this comment.  A typical
attribution in a peer reviewed scientific journal looks like, e.g.,
"B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 121801 (2003)", where the
"et al." represents 600+ people.

Martin

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Martin Michlmayr wrote:


* Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-05-04 09:20]:
 


I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of
changing licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I got
a response.;-)
   



I wonder if you're aware that virtually every distro is moving away
from XFree86.
 

They don't want to attribute.  It is contrary to the distro brand 
awareness monopilization interest.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Brian Thomas Sniffen]

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> There is a difference between free software and plagiarizable
> software.  The two are orthogonal concepts.
>
> Debian wants software to be both free and plagiarizable.  XFree86 and
> I want our software to be free but not plagiarizable.  In general, I
> want software to not be plagiarizable, as I think it works against the
> societal interest to not attribute accurately.  Saying that plagiarism
> is an important freedom is like saying assault is something you must
> be allowed to do if you are to be considered free.

No, it is exactly like saying plagiarism is something you must be
allowed to do if you are to be considered free.  If the law prevented
me from making false statements, I would not be free.  My nose is
blue, for example, and frequently emits badgers.  To make that
statement illegal is to restrict my freedom.  It is only a short step
from there to restricting me from saying that two plus two equals four.

Now, *fraud* is illegal -- so there is no need for a copyright license
to inhibit fraud, because it's already a crime.  But for me to have
freedom with respect to an artifact, I must have freedom to change it
in arbitrary ways.  "All ways that do not remove the maker's mark" is
not enough.  Then it is a shared artifact, an open artifact even, but
not a free artifact.

Similarly, to have freedom with respect to a computer program, I must
have freedom to change it.  Required display of certain text is fine
for a shared source program, or an open source program, but it is not
a free program.

-Brian

> Hans
>
> MJ Ray wrote:
>
>> On 2004-05-04 17:20:56 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> I understand why they lost interest in talking to persons who
>>> cannot grasp that distros removed mention of them from their man
>>> pages and this was wrong.
>>
>>
>> That's actually irrelevant in that case. Their advertising clause is
>> actually not the reason for it being non-free, as I understand it,
>> although it does make it GPL-incompatible, which is a bit irritating.
>>
>> Their licence requires extreme protection of their name as a
>> condition, which seems unacceptable for free software. If I even
>> mention in a factual review who holds the copyright to the software,
>> I have probably failed the letter of the conditions.
>>
>> It seems a little cruel of you to punish all users by taking your
>> code non-free because you are not happy with some distributor
>> actions. You should work with the distributors instead of accusing
>> them of immorality as an opening tactic. That should be the last
>> resort, not the first.
>>
>>> I sent them a thanks for being brave enough to take on the task of
>>> changing licensing mores and forcing distros to attribute, and I
>>> got a response.;-)
>>
>>
>> You seem to enjoy working against free software. I got some
>> responses, too, as previously mentioned.
>>

-- 
Brian Sniffen   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

MJ Ray wrote:





XFree86 and I want our software to be free but not plagiarizable.



Great! I look forward to you both fixing your licences.


Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable in 
the view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.


Assault is the wrong analogy, lying is what plagiarism is.  Having a 
license that prevents lying about who did what is not a restriction on 
freedom any more than laws against fraud restrict freedom of speech.




In general, I want software to not be plagiarizable, as I think it 
works against the societal interest to not attribute accurately.



I agree.


So support those who do something to stop plagiarism.



Saying that plagiarism is an important freedom is like saying assault 
is something you must be allowed to do if you are to be considered free.



No-one has said that. You seem to be constructing straw men.

In case you missed it, the problem which makes XFree86's latest 
licence definitely non-free (not just GPL-incompatible) is independent 
of their advertising clause.



What problem do you speak of?

And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  Advertisements 
sell products, credits describe who made the project happen.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

When you go to the opera, they don't come on stage and say buy XYZ, but 
they do say something prominent on the brochure like "we thank the 
generous ABC corporation for making this evening happen".  Debian should 
follow that model, it works and is morally right to do.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-04 18:47:02 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable 
in the 
view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.


Can someone give a conclusive statement of what actually happened? The 
bug report 152547 looks like someone moved an advert into the docs 
accompanying, rather than removed any attribution. Now, if you call 
that advert "the credits" then I think you have a different view to 
many people.



Assault is the wrong analogy, lying is what plagiarism is.


Sure, but you've not shown any of these by debian yet.

Having a license 
that prevents lying about who did what is not a restriction on 
freedom any 
more than laws against fraud restrict freedom of speech.


Yes, that seems true and saying "you must attribute this to me, not 
you" would be fine, if redundant. Putting in the licence "you must 
include this report of a conversation between Hans Reiser and his 
lawyer" would not really prevent lying about who did what.



I agree.

So support those who do something to stop plagiarism.


I do. I also support those who do things to promote free software.

In case you missed it, the problem which makes XFree86's latest 
licence 
definitely non-free (not just GPL-incompatible) is independent of 
their 
advertising clause.

What problem do you speak of?


Their new condition clause 4, which says you cannot use their name, 
even for accurate reporting. Normally, this would just be a false 
statement, but this licence makes it a condition of the grant. I've 
not seen that mistake committed by anyone else yet.


And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  
Advertisements sell 
products, credits describe who made the project happen.


No, it is advertising for the XFree86 Project, Inc. In addition to 
acknowledging their copyright (the credit), that advert may have to 
appear.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-04 18:40:49 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Martin Michlmayr wrote:

I wonder if you're aware that virtually every distro is moving away
from XFree86.
They don't want to attribute.  It is contrary to the distro brand 
awareness 
monopilization interest.


I look forward to your entertaining contributions to the debian 
trademark discussions when the trademark committee reports.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Joe Wreschnig]

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 12:54, Hans Reiser wrote:
> When you go to the opera, they don't come on stage and say buy XYZ, but 
> they do say something prominent on the brochure like "we thank the 
> generous ABC corporation for making this evening happen".  Debian should 
> follow that model, it works and is morally right to do.

This is a very good analogy.

Debian will happily print your credits in our "brochure"
(/usr/share/doc/*reiser*/copyright), which is an optional read for
people who want to see the opera (use the ReiserFS software). We'll even
do it prominently, all caps, whatever. But we will not walk out on stage
(print messages during use of the software) to advertise your
filesystem.

We do follow that model, it does work, and it is the right thing to do.
-- 
Joe Wreschnig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jeremy Hankins]

I think a bit of confusion's developed as to just what people are
after.  That's silly & stupid, so I'm going to try to be very precise
(anal, even) about language in this message.  Be warned.  ;)

Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> There is a difference between free software and plagiarizable
> software.  The two are orthogonal concepts.

We're not talking about plagiarizing software.  That's when someone
claims to have written someone else's code.  That's silly, and wrong,
and probably against the law without even considering the license.
That's not what you want this license to prevent -- not least because it
does absolutely nothing to prevent it.

The question d-l has is: what *are* you trying to achieve?  Because
there are two possibilities (given that we consider the license as
written non-free):

- You're trying to achieve something we consider non-free.  This isn't a
  terribly interesting case -- your software can't go into debian main.
  Nothing personal, we're just following our social contract.

- Your goal isn't, in itself, non-free.  This is the interesting case,
  because it means that we're not communicating well, and we don't
  understand your license.  Likely, this means that the wording of the
  license could be improved.

So what are you trying to accomplish?  Based on what I've read of this
thread, I can see a few possibilities:

- You don't want people to plagiarize your software.  I.e., you don't
  want folks like me to claim to have written it.

- You want to make sure that information about who contributed
  (financially and/or intellectually) to ReiserFS is readily available,
  so that folks who want to know can find out.

- You want to make sure that people know who contributed to ReiserFS
  regardless of whether or not they are interested in finding out.

The first two options are fine, depending on how they're implemented.
If that's what you want, I'm sure we can hash out wording for the
license that would satisfy both you and d-l.

A couple comments (that I may not be remembering properly) seemed to
imply that these credits are part of a revenue generating model.  Folks
who wish to require users to see their name in conjunction with ReiserFS
may purchase this control over what ReiserFS users see (i.e., they can
purchase an ad -- the first TV ads worked exactly like this, that's why
the word "sponsor" is used to refer to ad purchasers).  If this is the
case, and you are using the license to implement this control (i.e.,
option three above), then I think it's clear that you intend your
license to work exactly as it appears to, and restrict users' freedom.

If this is your goal (or perhaps some other variant on item 3 above)
I don't think you're going to have much luck convincing folks on d-l
that your license is Free.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03

RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Burnes, James]

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.  It would be tantamount to a random civil engineer trotting
the blueprints to the Golden Gate bridge out as their own design.  The
social and professional repercussions would be immediate, highly
negative and totally incompatible with the motivation for contributing
to FOSS systems.

I'd like to get an idea of what the major concerns are surrounding
"plagiarism" and FOSS.

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.

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?  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.

4. How about this for a self-referential solution to the problem.  In
ReiserV4, you could view the ReiserV4 credits by simply looking at the
credits meta properties in reiser4.o or any other software.  Sounds like
a good idea for a plugin or default behavior.  The ability to view
credits like this might make software engineers recommend V4 for this
reason alone.   ;-)

5. It would probably be easy enough to put hooks in the Gnome and KDE
help subsystems so that the Help/Credits menu item would scan the binary
for attributions.

6. I've said this before, but if the 'credits' program doesn't find the
exact 'attributions' structure in the binary, it can do a multi-part
diff/MD5 and then match it to the closest known version.  This algorithm
might be similar to the rsync or advanced binary diff algorithms.  That
way if there are no attribution macros or someone intentionally strips
or alters attributions you could track it.  I'm sure some digital
signature technique could be used to guarantee non-alteration.  What if
the team members each digitally signed the their source modules?

Anyway, these are all possible technical solutions to a human problem.
People would like attribution for the hard work they do.  Naturally.

Is there a better mechanism?

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.

Think about it,

(1) Everytime the kernel invokes kmod, the kmod team brays about how
great they are.
(2) Everytime someone opens a dynamic library, it shouts about how great
it is.
(3) Everytime your email program starts up, it delays for 20 seconds
while it advertises for the team.  Of course if you buy support, this
message goes away.  Hmmm
(4) Everytime a particular SMTP service starts up it announces it's
version and a random contributor.  For people trying to hack into
systems, this is very bad as it can be used to determine whether there
are vulnerabilities.
(5) By this time, we begin experiencing a very low coefficient of static
friction on the development slope.

There has to be a better way, or FOSS software wouldn't exist.

In short, can you guys give some real examples where developers
intentions have been abused or are likely to be abused by GPL V2?

Thanks,

jim burnes


 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Lewis Jardine]

Burnes, James wrote:

(1) Everytime the kernel invokes kmod, the kmod team brays about how
great they are.
(2) Everytime someone opens a dynamic library, it shouts about how great
it is.
(3) Everytime your email program starts up, it delays for 20 seconds
while it advertises for the team.  Of course if you buy support, this
message goes away.  Hmmm
(4) Everytime a particular SMTP service starts up it announces it's
version and a random contributor.  For people trying to hack into
systems, this is very bad as it can be used to determine whether there
are vulnerabilities.


If the above software is Free, it does not contravene the license to 
modify the software so it doesn't do this (without specific examples, I 
can't be sure if the above software is free or not). One can only assume 
that the developers are either a) OK with this, or b) militantly unaware 
of the permissions they are granting when they release their software 
under a Free license.


I find it unlikely that people intelligent enough to write software as 
complex as Apache, Sendmail, Linux, Thunderbird, etc. would license 
their software under a license they haven't fully read, or don't fully 
understand. I (and, in my opinion, any 'reasonable person') must assume 
that when an author releases under the GPL, he intends to permit any 
modification of the program (including the removal of run-time 
advertisements), as the GPL states.


'GPL + rider' licenses, on the other hand, show that the author really 
intends some other license, which is often non-free.


GPL initially, followed by an amendment into 'GPL + rider' suggests that 
the author fits into category b).


--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL IANADD

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Russ Allbery]

Lewis Jardine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> I find it unlikely that people intelligent enough to write software as
> complex as Apache, Sendmail, Linux, Thunderbird, etc. would license
> their software under a license they haven't fully read, or don't fully
> understand. I (and, in my opinion, any 'reasonable person') must assume
> that when an author releases under the GPL, he intends to permit any
> modification of the program (including the removal of run-time
> advertisements), as the GPL states.

The GPL is actually a rather interesting case here, since it *does*
require the preservation of credits, and in a way that I believe Debian
finds acceptably free.

|   2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
| of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
| distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
| above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
| 
| [...]
| 
| c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
| when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
| interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
| announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
| notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
| a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
| these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
| License.  (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
| does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
| the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

In fact, on first glance, I'm not sure that I understand the difference
between Debian's inclusion of software which triggers GPL 2c (such as bc)
and a similar clause for non-interactive programs.  Maybe I'm missing some
previous discussion?

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jeremy Hankins]

Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> The GPL is actually a rather interesting case here, since it *does*
> require the preservation of credits, and in a way that I believe
> Debian finds acceptably free.

2c of the GPL is actually somewhat controversial.  I don't know whether
anyone actually thinks it makes the license non-free, but I suspect a
number of people would be quite happy if it were removed from the GPL.

That said, it's much weaker than the proposed "clarification" for
reiserfs4:

- As you point out, it's only for interactive use.  While not (directly)
  a freeness issue, that does significantly reduce the burden; since
  it's being used interactively you've ruled out a lot of the more
  irritating times to display a verbose message.

- It defines what must be presented clearly (i.e., copyright, no
  warranty, where to find the GPL), but in the loosest possible terms
  ("display an announcement including" the information, rather than
  dictating text).

- The stuff being displayed serves a clear legal purpose and cannot be
  expanded/added to by downstream modifications.  For example, two works
  which both display such a blurb, when combined, need only display one
  such blurb, rather than the combination of two different blurbs.

Personally, I consider this to be about the outside limit wrt freedom.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Brian Thomas Sniffen]

Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> |   2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
> | of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
> | distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
> | above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
> | 
> | [...]
> | 
> | c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
> | when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
> | interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
> | announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
> | notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
> | a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
> | these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
> | License.  (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
> | does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
> | the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
>
> In fact, on first glance, I'm not sure that I understand the difference
> between Debian's inclusion of software which triggers GPL 2c (such as bc)
> and a similar clause for non-interactive programs.  Maybe I'm missing some
> previous discussion?

Well, for a start, it's legal to add a -q option to bc -- since that
is not the way to start running it in the most ordinary way.  It's
also legal to modify all such programs to look for a ~/.gnu-shut-up
file, and if it sees one to leave out the copyright and non-warranty
notices.

It is also legal to derive noninteractive works, and use them to
interface with tightly defined communications protocols.  If I want to
modify reiserfs to work in an elevator controller, with no useful
display, how can I comply with the provisions which require credits?

I cannot modify the software to be useful to me, so it is not Free.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[David Masover]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1


First and foremost:  Hans, this is your project.  Someone willing to
replace entire APIs with things that feel like files is obviously not
afraid of creating something new.  So at the end of the day, it
shouldn't matter too much that it's in Debian Non-free, especially if
(assuming I heard correctly) XFree86 is also non-free.

But that's also your decision -- if you want to "allow plagarism",
that's also up to you.  I certainly can't make the call -- I'm just a kid[1]

Furthermore, I don't care how many credits you flash, as long as it
doesn't start lagging my ssh connections or creating huge logs.

It's important that credits be there.  However, as long as they can be
found by experienced users looking for them, and aren't actively hidden
("dark side of the moon" could be a lot farther away than
/usr/share/doc/reiser4-/README.gz, considering that everyone
knows to look there).

It's not important that everyone see the credits, unless someone has a
severe case of vanity.  The only reason I can think of to force everyone
to see the credits without asking is to make Hans Reiser (and perhaps
the other <100 people who see the source) a household name.

What's important is that it's always possible to find the credits.  This
allows individuals to refer to those credits when searching for a new
job (or new funding, or a TV spot, whatever).  When I see credits flash
by my face, if I see the same name enough times, I might remember it.
Otherwise, it's only when I'm obsessive, or it's a single name.  I will
remember Hans anyway, because he's in the name.  I usually remember the
names of lead actors.  But I don't remember the names of the cameraman
in scene five, and it's unlikely if I did that I'd seriously consider
seeing another movie just because he shot a scene in it.

For the cameraman, it's really only important when someone's making a
new movie and they want a cameraman who's experienced in a particular
style.  Maybe I'm over-dramatizing, but if I hacked on reiser4, I'd be
in a similar circumstance -- I don't care if John Q. Public sees my
name, but maybe later I'd start my own project, and I'd refer to the
credits.


As for flashing info during the install, I'd rather have an actual pager
available on the same screen as the progress bar.  I've watched some
programs take so long to install that it showed me "You can use this
online, too!" or similar for half an hour.  On newer, faster machines,
I've seen programs install so fast that I just got a blur of
information.  The pager lets me read at my pace, as well as at my
machine's pace.


Debian people:  If so many things are non-free, I say you need to either
relax or create some subclasses of non-free.  I like the reiser license,
I don't like the java license, and so I don't put java on until I have
to, but I put reiser on first (especially considering I have v4 as root
on one box).  It should be possible for the distro to make that choice
available.  And I speak of the "non-free" distro, since the "free" group
seems to turn up their noses at anything that doesn't make the cut.


That is the last you will hear from me on this subject (so reply to the
lists instead).  I don't currently have a girlfriend, and if I intend to
change that, I won't spend any more time ranting about what to do with a
list of names and email addresses.





[1]  I am 17, and will be 18 in January.  At some point I'll have to
stop flaunting my youth, but right now, I jump over multiple chairs on
every snack raid from my computer.

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RE: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Nathanael Nerode]

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?  :-)


> 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.  :-)


-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Nathanael Nerode]

Hans Reiser wrote:

> Burnes, James wrote:
> 
>>Is there any way to do an MD5 of either (1) each module in a software
>>subsystem or (2) each software version and then have a central registry
>>where interested developers and users can go to see the credits?
>>
>>  
>>
> Credits that users must take action to see are not effective credits. No
> one will look at them.

Well, it's definitely very non-free to try to force people to look at the
credits.  It's hopeless anyway.  Look at how many people walk out of movies
before the credits roll.  It would certainly be frighteningly non-free to
force them to sit through the credits.  Most of them ignore the opening
credits too.  (I, myself, always watch the credits.)

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Nathanael Nerode]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> Lewis Jardine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
>> I find it unlikely that people intelligent enough to write software as
>> complex as Apache, Sendmail, Linux, Thunderbird, etc. would license
>> their software under a license they haven't fully read, or don't fully
>> understand. I (and, in my opinion, any 'reasonable person') must assume
>> that when an author releases under the GPL, he intends to permit any
>> modification of the program (including the removal of run-time
>> advertisements), as the GPL states.
> 
> The GPL is actually a rather interesting case here, since it *does*
> require the preservation of credits, and in a way that I believe Debian
> finds acceptably free.
> 
> |   2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
> | of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
> | distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
> | above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
> | 
> | [...]
> | 
> | c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
> | when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
> | interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
> | announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
> | notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
> | a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
> | these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
> | License.  (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
> | does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
> | the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
> 
> In fact, on first glance, I'm not sure that I understand the difference
> between Debian's inclusion of software which triggers GPL 2c (such as bc)
> and a similar clause for non-interactive programs.  Maybe I'm missing some
> previous discussion?

Well, first of all we don't really like programs which trigger 2c.

Second, and much more important, non-interactive programs often have defined
output.  A similar credits requirement on a non-interactive program can
make it outright impossible to make the code produce the necessary defined
output.

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin Dickopp]

Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Burnes, James wrote:
>
>> 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?  :-)

I like the idea as well.  FWIW, as an experimental implementation
attempt, I have just modified my own little program (jpegpixi, of which
I'm the upstream author; I'm not a DD) to put the copyright and license
information (i.e. the text which is normally output in reaction to the
--version command line option) in a separate ELF section ".license".
The objcopy command can be used to dump and/or extract the contents of
this section.

Martin

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

MJ Ray wrote:


On 2004-05-04 18:47:02 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable 
in the view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.



Can someone give a conclusive statement of what actually happened? The 
bug report 152547 looks like someone moved an advert into the docs 
accompanying, rather than removed any attribution. Now, if you call 
that advert "the credits" then I think you have a different view to 
many people.


Show me the line in those credits where it said "buy Coca-Cola cheaper 
here".  They were credits, not advertisements.




Their new condition clause 4, which says you cannot use their name, 
even for accurate reporting. Normally, this would just be a false 
statement, but this licence makes it a condition of the grant. I've 
not seen that mistake committed by anyone else yet.


Can you supply their full verbatim phrasing so that we can discuss it 
accurately? I'd like to understand whether your characterization is correct.




And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  
Advertisements sell products, credits describe who made the project 
happen.



No, it is advertising for the XFree86 Project, Inc. In addition to 
acknowledging their copyright (the credit), that advert may have to 
appear.


You seem to understand the difference between credit and advertisement 
as advertisements are credits for those you dislike.  If they are 
putting their name on their software or its documentation, then surely 
it is a credit not an advertisement.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Joe Wreschnig wrote:


On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 12:54, Hans Reiser wrote:
 

When you go to the opera, they don't come on stage and say buy XYZ, but 
they do say something prominent on the brochure like "we thank the 
generous ABC corporation for making this evening happen".  Debian should 
follow that model, it works and is morally right to do.
   



This is a very good analogy.

Debian will happily print your credits in our "brochure"
(/usr/share/doc/*reiser*/copyright), which is an optional read for
people who want to see the opera (use the ReiserFS software). We'll even
do it prominently, all caps, whatever. But we will not walk out on stage
(print messages during use of the software) to advertise your
filesystem.
 

Reiser4 prints them when you make a new filesystem, not when you use the 
filesystem.  We are not as aggressive as you imagine.  While I do 
personally think that boot time credits should be returned to existence, 
I am not asking for that.



We do follow that model, it does work, and it is the right thing to do.
 

Operas put the credits where they get seen.  Where a contributor is 
really significant to it happening, a theater group (little league 
baseball game, etc.) will mention on stage sometimes.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Nikita Danilov]

Hans Reiser writes:
 > MJ Ray wrote:
 > 
 > > On 2004-05-04 18:47:02 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 > >
 > >> Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable 
 > >> in the view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.
 > >
 > >
 > > Can someone give a conclusive statement of what actually happened? The 
 > > bug report 152547 looks like someone moved an advert into the docs 
 > > accompanying, rather than removed any attribution. Now, if you call 
 > > that advert "the credits" then I think you have a different view to 
 > > many people.
 > 
 > Show me the line in those credits where it said "buy Coca-Cola cheaper 
 > here".  They were credits, not advertisements.

--
...
And my lawyer asked 'People pay you money for this?'.  Yup.  Hee Hee.
Life is good.  If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add
rather than reinventing an entire FS.  You should buy some free software
too
--

If these are credits, then Coca-cola is gpled. This is just _noise_,
spewed on each invocation.

 > 
 > >
 > > Their new condition clause 4, which says you cannot use their name, 
 > > even for accurate reporting. Normally, this would just be a false 
 > > statement, but this licence makes it a condition of the grant. I've 
 > > not seen that mistake committed by anyone else yet.
 > 
 > Can you supply their full verbatim phrasing so that we can discuss it 
 > accurately? I'd like to understand whether your characterization is correct.
 > 
 > >
 > >> And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  
 > >> Advertisements sell products, credits describe who made the project 
 > >> happen.
 > >
 > >
 > > No, it is advertising for the XFree86 Project, Inc. In addition to 
 > > acknowledging their copyright (the credit), that advert may have to 
 > > appear.
 > >
 > You seem to understand the difference between credit and advertisement 
 > as advertisements are credits for those you dislike.  If they are 
 > putting their name on their software or its documentation, then surely 
 > it is a credit not an advertisement.

Nikita.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Jamin W. Collins]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 06:16:50PM +0200, Martin Dickopp wrote:
> Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > Burnes, James wrote:
> >
> >> 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?  :-)
> 
> I like the idea as well.  FWIW, as an experimental implementation
> attempt, I have just modified my own little program (jpegpixi, of which
> I'm the upstream author; I'm not a DD) to put the copyright and license
> information (i.e. the text which is normally output in reaction to the
> --version command line option) in a separate ELF section ".license".
> The objcopy command can be used to dump and/or extract the contents of
> this section.

How much did this addition increase the size of the final binary?

Hypothetically, would you object to this information being stripped if
your binary were used on an embedded or low space device?

-- 
Jamin W. Collins

"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

A typical example:

/sbin/mkreiserfs -V
mkreiserfs 3.6.9 (2003 www.namesys.com)

A pair of credits:
Alexander Zarochentcev  (zam)  wrote the high low priority locking code, 
online
resizer for V3 and V4, online repacker for V4, block allocation code, 
and major
parts of  the flush code,  and maintains the transaction manager code.  
We give
him the stuff  that we know will be hard to debug,  or needs to be very 
cleanly

structured.

BigStorage  (www.bigstorage.com)  contributes to our general fund  every 
month,

and has done so for quite a long time.

Nikita Danilov wrote:


Hans Reiser writes:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> 
> > On 2004-05-04 18:47:02 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> >
> >> Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable 
> >> in the view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.

> >
> >
> > Can someone give a conclusive statement of what actually happened? The 
> > bug report 152547 looks like someone moved an advert into the docs 
> > accompanying, rather than removed any attribution. Now, if you call 
> > that advert "the credits" then I think you have a different view to 
> > many people.
> 
> Show me the line in those credits where it said "buy Coca-Cola cheaper 
> here".  They were credits, not advertisements.


--
...
And my lawyer asked 'People pay you money for this?'.  Yup.  Hee Hee.
Life is good.  If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add
rather than reinventing an entire FS.  You should buy some free software
too
--

If these are credits, then Coca-cola is gpled. This is just _noise_,
spewed on each invocation.
 


Hmmm.  Ok, you are right, I should change the wording of that.

> 
> >
> > Their new condition clause 4, which says you cannot use their name, 
> > even for accurate reporting. Normally, this would just be a false 
> > statement, but this licence makes it a condition of the grant. I've 
> > not seen that mistake committed by anyone else yet.
> 
> Can you supply their full verbatim phrasing so that we can discuss it 
> accurately? I'd like to understand whether your characterization is correct.
> 
> >
> >> And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  
> >> Advertisements sell products, credits describe who made the project 
> >> happen.

> >
> >
> > No, it is advertising for the XFree86 Project, Inc. In addition to 
> > acknowledging their copyright (the credit), that advert may have to 
> > appear.

> >
> You seem to understand the difference between credit and advertisement 
> as advertisements are credits for those you dislike.  If they are 
> putting their name on their software or its documentation, then surely 
> it is a credit not an advertisement.


Nikita.


 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Vitaly, change the paragraph Nikita complained of to:

Continuing core development of ReiserFS is  mostly paid for by Hans 
Reiser from
money made selling licenses  in addition to the GPL to companies who 
don't want
it known that they use ReiserFS  as a foundation for their proprietary 
product.  We

thank those anonymous companies.  Hans Reiser and Namesys also perform
consulting to companies who miscellaneous kernel work done, and we thank 
those

companies also.

Nikita Danilov wrote:


Hans Reiser writes:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> 
> > On 2004-05-04 18:47:02 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> >
> >> Our licenses are free and not plagiarizable.  GPL V2 is plagiarizable 
> >> in the view of folks at debian who felt free to remove the credits.

> >
> >
> > Can someone give a conclusive statement of what actually happened? The 
> > bug report 152547 looks like someone moved an advert into the docs 
> > accompanying, rather than removed any attribution. Now, if you call 
> > that advert "the credits" then I think you have a different view to 
> > many people.
> 
> Show me the line in those credits where it said "buy Coca-Cola cheaper 
> here".  They were credits, not advertisements.


--
...
And my lawyer asked 'People pay you money for this?'.  Yup.  Hee Hee.
Life is good.  If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add
rather than reinventing an entire FS.  You should buy some free software
too
--

If these are credits, then Coca-cola is gpled. This is just _noise_,
spewed on each invocation.
 


Those sales make it possible every once in a long while to pay salaries

> 
> >
> > Their new condition clause 4, which says you cannot use their name, 
> > even for accurate reporting. Normally, this would just be a false 
> > statement, but this licence makes it a condition of the grant. I've 
> > not seen that mistake committed by anyone else yet.
> 
> Can you supply their full verbatim phrasing so that we can discuss it 
> accurately? I'd like to understand whether your characterization is correct.
> 
> >
> >> And call it a credit clause, not an advertising clause.  
> >> Advertisements sell products, credits describe who made the project 
> >> happen.

> >
> >
> > No, it is advertising for the XFree86 Project, Inc. In addition to 
> > acknowledging their copyright (the credit), that advert may have to 
> > appear.

> >
> You seem to understand the difference between credit and advertisement 
> as advertisements are credits for those you dislike.  If they are 
> putting their name on their software or its documentation, then surely 
> it is a credit not an advertisement.


Nikita.


 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Jeremy Hankins wrote:



A couple comments (that I may not be remembering properly) seemed to
imply that these credits are part of a revenue generating model.  Folks
who wish to require users to see their name in conjunction with ReiserFS
may purchase this control over what ReiserFS users see (i.e., they can
purchase an ad -- the first TV ads worked exactly like this, that's why
the word "sponsor" is used to refer to ad purchasers).  If this is the
case, and you are using the license to implement this control (i.e.,
option three above), then I think it's clear that you intend your
license to work exactly as it appears to, and restrict users' freedom.

If this is your goal (or perhaps some other variant on item 3 above)
I don't think you're going to have much luck convincing folks on d-l
that your license is Free.

 

Please consider my distinction between a credit (public television in 
the USA has them), and an ad (for profit broadcast television has them).


I don't find the credits annoying, I don't like the ads.  Maybe the 
broadcasters could make more effort to make the ads less annoying and 
more informative, but their sense of civic duty is too lacking.


I do like well funded television shows.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Chris Dukes]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 12:34:46PM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Please consider my distinction between a credit (public television in 
> the USA has them), and an ad (for profit broadcast television has them).

Both are ads.  One just makes a poor attempt at failing to mention an
actual product making a credit on PBS nearly indistinguishable from
most pharmeceutical commercials.
> 
> I don't find the credits annoying, I don't like the ads.  Maybe the 
> broadcasters could make more effort to make the ads less annoying and 
> more informative, but their sense of civic duty is too lacking.
> 
> I do like well funded television shows.

Maybe if you'd watch more television instead of trying to be a lawyer
this thread could have died long ago.

I'll be blunt.
Your current shenanigans, including the misuse of the term plagiarism,
discourage me from recommending reiserfs and to strongly contemplate
removing it from systems I am responsible for.
I suspect that others have well, they just haven't bothered to tell you.

Your desire to advertise, advertise, and advertise runs contrary to the
Unix philosophy of "Don't output a damn thing if it ran right, and 
frequently don't output a damn thing if it failed miserably."
I don't want to see your parp.

Your desire to tinker with the license flies in the face of the GPL.

If you're so damned sure that your desire to put advertising in the code
is right and won't alienate your users, get a lawyer that does software
licenses to draw up one to your specifications and kindly shut up until
you 
1) Get the license drafted
2) Get all of the reiserfs copyright holders to sign off on using the license.

As an alternative, perhaps you could talk with Theo DeRaadt about porting
Reiserfs to OpenBSD.

-- 
Chris Dukes
Been there, done that, got the slightly-charred t-shirt. -- Crowder

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Chris Dukes wrote:



2) Get all of the reiserfs copyright holders to sign off on using the license.
 


I have licensing rights to all of reiserfs in all versions.

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Chris Dukes]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 12:54:22PM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Chris Dukes wrote:
> 
> >
> >2) Get all of the reiserfs copyright holders to sign off on using the 
> >license.
> > 
> >
> I have licensing rights to all of reiserfs in all versions.

You do not have copyright on code contributions that came from outside
of namesys, unless the copyright was released to you by the author.

You currently have licensing rights under GPL2 over all of that code.

As I said, shutup and talk with a lawyer.

-- 
Chris Dukes
Been there, done that, got the slightly-charred t-shirt. -- Crowder

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser]

Chris Dukes wrote:


On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 12:54:22PM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
 


Chris Dukes wrote:

   

2) Get all of the reiserfs copyright holders to sign off on using the 
license.



 


I have licensing rights to all of reiserfs in all versions.
   



You do not have copyright on code contributions that came from outside
of namesys, unless the copyright was released to you by the author.
 


It was.  Lawyer wrote the agreements.  Please go away.


You currently have licensing rights under GPL2 over all of that code.

As I said, shutup and talk with a lawyer.

 

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Martin Dickopp]

"Jamin W. Collins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 06:16:50PM +0200, Martin Dickopp wrote:
>> Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> 
>> > Burnes, James wrote:
>> >
>> >> 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?  :-)
>> 
>> I like the idea as well.  FWIW, as an experimental implementation
>> attempt, I have just modified my own little program (jpegpixi, of which
>> I'm the upstream author; I'm not a DD) to put the copyright and license
>> information (i.e. the text which is normally output in reaction to the
>> --version command line option) in a separate ELF section ".license".
>> The objcopy command can be used to dump and/or extract the contents of
>> this section.
>
> How much did this addition increase the size of the final binary?

It is not really an addition, because the text was there before, just
not in a separate section.  The --version command line option still
displays the same text, although it is now in a separate section.  The
main benefit of the current experimental implementation is that a shell
script (e.g. a one line objcopy wrapper) could also access the text
(given only the binary file).

To answer your question, the new section increases the binary file size
by 48 bytes, which is probably due to the additional ELF header.

> Hypothetically, would you object to this information being stripped if
> your binary were used on an embedded or low space device?

No, I wouldn't.  Frankly, I don't see how I could without introducing
additional restrictions to the GPL.  The result of stripping the section
is no different from removing the text from the source and recompiling.

Technically, if stripping the section is an option, IMHO the program
should be changed to react sensibly if it is invoked with the --version
command line option and the section is absent.

Martin


PS: If people are interested in exploring this further, should the
discussion be moved to a technical list (e.g. -devel)?

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-06 19:53:10 +0100 Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Show me the line in those credits where it said "buy Coca-Cola 
cheaper here". 
They were credits, not advertisements.


Someone else has given the most extreme example of this. I thank them.

Can you supply their full verbatim phrasing so that we can discuss it 
accurately? I'd like to understand whether your characterization is 
correct.


Please take it up in an XFree86 thread. It has little to do with your 
problems.


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.


If they are putting their 
name on their software or its documentation, then surely it is a 
credit not 
an advertisement.


They are putting their name in other people's software and 
documentation too.


I thank others for continuing to point out your errors. I have a 
conference schedule to organise and papers to write, which are both 
preferable to a seemingly endless debate with an extremely hostile 
opponent of debian contributors.


I really hope that other filesystems replace yours if you won't get 
clue.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Brian Thomas Sniffen]

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

-- 
Brian Sniffen   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-05-07 00:21:32 +0100 Brian Thomas Sniffen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:



MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

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.


Please excuse my bad phrasing. That last "you" was "reiserfs 
developers" or similar. As I said, I am busy. Not an excuse, but an 
explanation.


--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing