Re: Nvidia and its choice to read the GPL "differently"

Larry McVoy
2003-01-08T13:42:31Z

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 03:00:23AM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Great. So not only is there no legal need to cite GNU in the Linux
> name, there is no ethical obligation either.
>
> There is no ethical obligation to mention secondary contributions
> incorporated in a large project. There ethical obligation is to cite
> the main developer. In the GNU/Linux system, the GNU Project is the
> principal contributor; the system is more GNU than anything else,
> and we started it.

Actually, to be legal, you need say GNU/Linux (Linux is a registered
trademark of Linus Torvalds).

As for the ethics, "cite the main developer"? Well, then, that's easy.
It is you and the FSF organization which are behind this GNU stuff and
since I've been around since before you started, I'm well aware of
how much work you did and how much was work that was simply assigned
over to the FSF. If we remove all the work that you did not do, then
it's vividly clear that Linux is a larger effort.

The vast majority of the GPLed software out there is not work that you
did, it is work that other people did. You are claiming credit for
their work, which is way over the unethical line, and attempting
to infringe on the work of the Linux community. Not nice.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm