On Nov 15, 2007 8:34 AM, Randall Nortman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > available to the user in this case? Even in the case of BSD-type > licenses that require credit to be given "in the documentation > accompanying the software", what documentation? Sure, you could stick
1) BSD license does not any longer require this stipulation. See http://www.opensource.org for the license verbiage. 2) In the user's manual: "This product uses or licenses components manufactured by the following parties: ..." What is so confusing about this? This kind of text appears in plenty of documentation for plenty of products already, in some form or another. > it in the manual for the appliance, but that would be confusing to the > average consumer. What if the embedded device is truly embedded in Nobody ever sees (2) above because nobody ever reads the users manual anymore. The average consumer especially. > to this sort of thing. So instead everybody reinvents the wheel, and > as a result more bugs creep into your refrigerator. (And the Even with pure public domain software, people are going to re-invent the wheel. An example I've written on another mailing list is that, in today's industry, we have MILLIONS of kinds of wheels. A Toyota Prius wheel will not fit a shopping cart, and a wooden wagon wheel doesn't do so hot as conveyer-belt rollers. The IDEA is what is open; the physical manifestation of the said idea is as domain-specific as the domain to which it is applied. This is as true in software as it is in the physical world. If you _religiously_ re-use software, you end up with horridly unmaintainable source, and massively fat binaries. Our OSes take gigabytes of space precisely because they're so dang general-purpose that they not only include the kitchen sink, but serve as both floor wax AND a desert topping too. This would never fly on an embedded device. -- Samuel A. Falvo II _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
