>>- ---- Reiserfs licence ------------------------------------------
>>Reiserfs is hereby licensed according to the Gnu Public License,
>>but with the following special terms: you may not integrate it
>>into any kernel (or if not added to a kernel, into any software
>>system) which is not also a GPL kernel (software system) without
>>obtaining from Hans Reiser an exception to this license.
>
>It's not incompatible with the GPL, but it is badly worded. As far as I
>can tell, this reiser guy doesn't fully understand the excruciating
>details of how copyright works. (Not suprising, most people don't.)
Exactly. That is why I brought it up. The licencing "seems" to
be GPL, but it is worded badly. I just wanted to see it reworded
properly for both our benefit, and the benefit of Hans and anyone
else who works on it as well.
>He says the code is hereby licenced under the GPL. The GPL says the code
>can't be linked with non-GPL code already, so him restating it is not
>anything new. Thus he's not saying anything that would put his modified
>GPL license into conflict with the standard GPL on the rest of the
>kernel. It strikes me as impressive sounding but completely meaningless
>legalese.
Right, the statements seem to echo what is in the GNU GPL
allready, but are worded badly and non-legal-sounding. Who knows
how it would be interpreted if it ever needed to be.
His intentions seem to be: The program is licenced under the GNU
General Public Licence version 2 or later, but is also available
under private licence for any interested parties.
>Those of you who already understand copyright and licensing issues can
>stop reading now.
>
>What I suspect Reiser MEANS to say is that the Reiserfs code is also
>offered under a different (non-gpl) license, and to get that other
>license you have to contact the original author and pay him money, and
>if you do that you might get tech support an a generally larger chunk of
>his time.
Right. That seems to be the gist of it. Any "licence" or other
legal document should not allow or force the reader to make
assumptions though, as others may see it differently.
Clarification is always best IMHO.
>Briefly (and somewhat over-simplifiedly), copyright is the legal right
>the creator of a work has to use or make copies of his original
>creation. He doesn't have to register it with the government or
>anything, according to the Berne convention he gets it just by creating
>the work (and the berne convention is an international treaty between an
>awful lot of countries).
>
>The author is the ONLY person who inherently has these rights to the
>work, although he can transmit those rights to others through a legal
>agreement called a "license". Nobody except the original author of a
>work has the rights to copy or use it AT ALL unless they have a valid
>license delegating some or all of the author's rights to them. Granting
>a license does not alter or diminish the author's copyright, and code
>may be licensed under different terms to several different organizations
>simultaneously.
Right, sounds good.
>The GPL is a specific license describing a set of terms under which code
>can be copied and used, and is described in detail on www.gnu.org
>somewhere. Reiser wants people to know he's willing to offer his code
>under a second, different license (so they can use it in proprietary
>products like Solaris, which the GPL would prevent), and he phrases this
>offer as a basically meaningless addendum to the first license he's
>making the code available under.
Right. I agree with your interpretation as well. The fact that
the "addendum" is meaningless as worded is what I'd like to see
corrected. I don't want to see someone sideswipe the licence due
to bad wording and perhaps steal the code.
It is important that we correct or point out licencing errors
like this when we find them, so that they can be fixed, and can
protect software the way the author truely intended - but perhaps
wasn't able to word well.
Take care!
TTYL
-- Mike A. Harris Linux advocate Computer Consultant GNU advocate Capslock Consulting Open Source advocateJoin the FreeMWare project - the goal to produce a FREE program in which you can run Windows 95/98/NT, and other operating systems.
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