Re: Cosmetic JFFS patch.

David Weinehall
2001-06-28T10:57:50Z

On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 11:19:37AM +0200, Bjorn Wesen wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Laramie Leavitt wrote:
> > > dmesg buffer space is rather limited and IMHO there isn't space to
> > > waste on credit-giving in boot logs.
> >
> > Here here. You don't see annoying log-eating copyright messages
> > printed out in the Windows boot. Just imagine:
>
> There's a difference; someone paid for that Windows code and you paid to
> get windows and don't care about who did what. But when someone puts down
> a lot of work to contributes something for free which others find useful
> and actually use, don't you think it might be prudent to let them at least
> write who contributed it, if a line is going to be printed anyway to say
> device that or that has been registred ?
>
> I know it sounds a bit like an "advertisment space" but it's always been
> so; people have been releasing code for free since noone knows how long
> and often one major factor has been that their peers will go "wow did
> you do that". Otherwise why would anyone ever write their name in an About
> box when they release a freeware program. And dmesg is the Linux kernels
> About box (someone might argue that the code is the about box but
> unfortunately most people dont read the headers in every .c file they
> use).
>
> See the old BSD license - distribution-wise it's more free than the GPL
> but you still had to give credit where credit is due when getting a free
> lunch from someone elses work (I think this requirement was dropped in the
> current BSD license)
>
> The risk is that some people might take it quite personally to get their
> names removed and might not be as interested to see their code in the
> kernel in the future. Of course as long as it's GPL nothing would stop it
> anyway, but I still think it's a good idea to give credit for others hard
> work.

tao@tictac$ grep "^N:" CREDITS | sed -e "s/N: //" | wc
392 863 5916

Add a little for (c) xxxx and other stuff, and you're getting close
to the size of the dmesg-buffer. Is it worth it?

Now, I can't claim to be 100% innocent; my name appears in the procinfo
for at least one MCA-driver. This will be remedied in due time, I can
assure you. I hope others follow my example.

/David Weinehall
_ _
// David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /> Northern lights wander \\
// Project MCA Linux hacker // Dance across the winter sky //
\> http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ </ Full colour fire </