Hi Bradley ! > "BusyBox is copyrighted by many authors between 1998-2012.\n" > "Licensed under GPLv2. See source distribution for detailed\n" > "copyright notices.\n"
I would find this ok, but I'm not a lawyer. > The trade-off here is really down to bytes that end up in the binary. > Ideally, we'd list all the copyright notices that Michael Setzer found > with his sed script, but that's 400 lines of copyright notices and > that's surely too much for the binary. IMO it may be a personal decision on many different aspects if we include a lengthy copyright notice within the binary or not. We can have a configuration option to select between a full list of all copyright holders (automatically generated from special "/* Copyright:" header lines in the source, or a short copyright notice (as noted above). In addition the copyright text shall be included in the binary as compressed text (gzip, lzma, etc.). Printing the message runs the text trough gunzip (or appropriate). Thus the size requirement for a full copyright text is usually a less smaller block than all the source lines, as they contain text which is pretty good compressible. For full desktop installations the few bytes of the full copyright usually doesn't matter. As this the full notice shall be the default. On systems where size really matters the maintainer may disable full copyright notice in the binary. In addition Busybox build process shall create an extra text file with full (and may be extended) copyright message. This file shall be installed under /usr/share/doc/busybox-VERSION/Copyright, and all system maintainers shall be forced to put this file on the final binary system, except if size constrains forbid this (e.g. initramfs). In such cases the system maintainer shall be forced to publish the full copyright message on a different way (e.g. web site or system documentation). That makes it more scalable than a fixed decision of full or not full copyright message, and system maintainers are able to select which fits better to there needs. -- Harald _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
