>Here is the relevant portion from that file reformatted for
>email, but otherwise intact:
>
>- ---- 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to learn about copyright or are simply really bored, there's
a stale but relatively detailed faq at
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/copyright , and no
patents are a different animal altogether, so are trademarks, and that
discussion definitely goes to email...
Sorry for taking up so much bandwidth...
Rob
--- "Evil" is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.
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