Re: BCM5700 Gbit driver in 2.2.xx kernel

[Reid Hekman <reid.hekman@ndsu.nodak.edu>]

On Fri, 2002-02-22 at 05:24, Pedro M. Rodrigues wrote:
>    Probably John Eskes is the just messenger. These silly and huge signatures are 
> crawling all over the place. 

Still, the party sending the message is responsible for initiating the
transmission of this legal mumbo jumbo. By using a service
provider(employers included) that attach these sorts of messages the
sender is implicitly assenting to abide by such disclaimers of rights
and responsibilities. Whether the disclaimer is valid or not is
irrelevant; if a party submitting a message to a list meant for public
and open discourse, personally or on behalf of his/her employer tries to
foist rude and/or onerous legal claims on said message, especially with
disregard to bandwidth and etiquette, they should fully expect to be
booted or blocked from the list.

> If they didn't have internal policies, who would have? :)

Policies are fine. Nobody has anything against policy. If, however, that
policy dictates that one is forced to append a load of crap on every
transmission to a public mailing list, then the list admin has every
right to blacklist that person. It doesn't matter that the sender may
have no control over the appended boilerplate. If the sender doesn't
agree with or ignores his provider's/employer's policy it's his
responsibility to get the policy changed or not use such a crap
provider. There are plenty of decent free email providers out there that
don't pull this kind of crap, so I'd suggest using one of those instead.

If a submitter to linux-kernel with such nasty and crude legalese is
required to do so on company business in some official capacity, then
I'd say they have more serious problems than getting blacklisted.

Sorry for the offtopic post, I just had to get that off my chest. The
only way to get people to stop pulling stupid-disclaimer-tricks is to
call them on it and not be afraid to get a little rough.

Regards,
Reid