Jeff
Rob Landley wrote:
>
>
>
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> >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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