Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

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 <sliedes@cc.hut.fi> -----
>
>Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:40:13 +0300
>From: Sami Liedes <sliedes@cc.hut.fi>
>To: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
>Cc: ed@debian.org, cavok@debian.org
>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
>
>
>  
>