Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 21:19:43 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: thorpej@nas.nasa.gov Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, core@FreeBSD.ORG, cgd@netbsd.org, ross@netbsd.org, core@netbsd.org Subject: Re: Copyright infringement in FreeBSD/alpha Message-ID: <199806102119.OAA12095@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806101905.MAA23788@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> from "Jason Thorpe" at Jun 10, 98 12:05:13 pm
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> [ Chris/Ross - I CC'd you so that are aware of it, and so that you can > watch out for it in the future... Also, Chris... who's the right > person at CMU to notify about this? ] > > So, I decided to take a look at the FreeBSD/alpha code that got checked > in today. > > Nice to see that the CMU copyright was left out of locore.s, even though > e.g. the following pieces were lifted basically verbatim from the NetBSD/alpha > locore.s: [ ... ] I don't think this was intentional "theft of work"; I think you just got an intermediate tree; clearly FreeBSD doesn't yet run on Alpha enough for it to be an issue. Yet. It will *definitely* be an issue later, however. Did you contact Doug directly? Also: isn't there precedent for removal of per-file copyright notices in favor of agregate notices? It may be that at least the CMU code is already covered under one of the blanket statements. I know that some of my code was "blanketed" in the same way by other BSD's (and even in VXWorks, from one vendor). I know that I was personally *real* offended by /bin/true and /bin/false have a zillion lines of copyright in them for a near-noop... though not as offended as when they were converted to binaries for stupid "copyright and intellectual protperty" claims. Certainly, credit that is not covered in a blanket statement should be given on individual files. Part of the problem may be that FreeBSD has a larger exposure of the internals of the source code control; is it more correct to commit the blanket copyright statement before the code, or vice versa? At what point is it required that the blanket statement be checked in... at the instant the other file is checked in? That's impossible. I think the answer is "as soon as is reasonable and prudent". That said, the exposed internals of the FreeBSD source control could certainly cause the commits to be construed as publication; therefore the blanket and/or file statements might have a requirement of being in sooner rather than later, when the code is actually usable on an Alpha system not running Linux. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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