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 It happens even in journals that are not peer reviewed, and merely editor reviewed, because it is the way that the broader scientific community expects people to behave.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