Advertising in Your Boot Sequence?

negaPLuCK writes: "i just mounted my first reiserfs partition. When the reiserfs.o module loaded into the kernel what popped out but ads for SuSE, MP3.com and Ecila.com." I've attached the exact text in the read more: it's more like sponsorship than ads, which on one hand is a cool way to finance development, but where is this gonna end?

May 3 00:59:34 nega-0 kernel: Checking ReiserFS transaction log (device 16:02) ...
May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: Replayed 0 transactions in 20 seconds
May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: ReiserFS core development sponsored by SuSE Labs (suse.com)
May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: Journaling sponsored by MP3.com
May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: Item handlers sponsored by Ecila.com
May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: ReiserFS version 3.5.18

Comments

It's open source

[szo]

So, if those messages bother you, remove them...

Szo

Re:It's open source

[plague3106]

Hmm..seems ok that they put them in there. Altho i would rather not for another reason; that stuff gets logged and its just more crap to look thru before i find the line i'm looking for. But then youi shouldn't be booting your linux box too much so it doesn't matter that much i guess:)

Re:It's open source

[ishpeck]

Yeah! And if not having them bothers you, you can add them! :)

• I love to sit and write code
• 
  When I get in a programming mode
  Compile and run
  It is so much fun

Re:It's open source

[ibpooks]

Don't delete the sponsorship messages! Yes, it's open source which gives you the ability to remove the tags just like you have the ability to run "rm -f CREDITS" on every tarball you extract. Aside from the ability to modify the source, the beauty of open source lies in the fact that ALL CONTRIBUTORS GET CREDIT! If a project had corporate backing, then the corporation should get credit for the part they helped do. I know I'd be pissed off if someone used my code without giving me credit, or if there was a renegade patch running around that REMOVED my line in the credits.

Re:It's open source

[Oarboat_7]

It strikes me as contradictory that the "noxious advertising clause" in the BSD license (now no longer mandatory) was criticized so stridently, but that now, with Linux, it's viewed as "a good thing."

Re:It's open source

[bero-rh]

I agree with the basics of this, but we'd soon end up with a kernel that doesn't display any useful information...


Ok, booting the kernel...
Linux 3.0.0
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Kernel development sponsored by Red Hat
Kernel development sponsored by MandrakeSoft
Kernel development sponsored by VA Linux Systems
Kernel development sponsored by Linuxcare
Kernel development sponsored by SuSE
Kernel development sponsored by Caldera
Kernel patches contributed by Debian
Individual contributors:
Alan Cox
[add 1000 more lines]
Bringing up network
Module 3c509.o loaded.
Parts developed by Donald Becker.
Parts developed by Alan Cox
This kernel module contains code from Red Hat.
This kernel module contains code from SuSE.
Trivial typo corrected by Bero
[Add 1000 more lines]


Everything can be taken too far...
Yes, everyone should get credited - but at bootup? Not that sure...

Re:It's open source

[mcrandello]

According to their Business and Licensing page, they are under the GPL (however they also sell other licenses). This is the distinction. The BSD license (The old one) requires the "noxious dvertising clause". Under the GPL you can feel free to remove any advertising or modify it in any way you like, so long as you provide source with any released binaries.

In either case, you could really do anything you wanted to, even change the advertising to microsoft.com if it's something you're only using on your own.

Re:It's open source

[rips]

It is one thing to have credit put in a comment block or a CREDITS file where people can figure out who contributed to the project. Its another thing to put text messages in the bootup sequence of a project. To me, by doing this crosses some faint but fundamental line and raises a potential use for OpenSource software as a media for advertising.

Re:It's open source

[hansreiser]

I just want to make clear that it is just fine with us for anyone who wants to remove them to remove them. Don't have any moral qualms about it, if it irritates, cut it out and accept our apology.

In a later version we make them less annoying by having them appear only once, and not at every mount. The messages aren't in our 2.3 version, we want to make sure that people don't hate them first. Thanks to those who express their opinions here. Your opinions matter to and influence me on this issue.

Since many of you are worried about it going from sponsored by X to "Buy Y, it is $50, click here!", let me say that I share your concern. Keeping it the way PBS used to be is very important to me personally. It is especially important to me to never allow an annoying ad even on our web page. I understand the temptation of the networks. When a big sponsor says that they want something that looks a certain way, it is really hard to say no and offend them. I will say no. You will never get an energizer bunny running across a Namesys product.

Putting the credits there was my idea, not the sponsors. I thought they deserved the credit. They never asked for it. I'm not sure they care much for it though, which is another reason it is not in the 2.3 version. It is strange, but being on our web page is really valuable to sponsors, but mount time credit just isn't as valued. This year.

Re:It's open source

[SurfsUp]

Actually I'm torn on whether I like them or not. These particular messages are certainly unobtrusive, modest, almost self-effacing. But still, it has nothing to do with how the computer boots. But still but still, I wouldn't mind having a generic place to put splash-type info, both for text mode and graphics, and some times I'd want to see it just out of interest. Especially the first time I boot a new distro.

To make sure this splash stuff stays informative and doesn't get irritating we need a generic way to turn it all off, and that method has to act early in the boot sequence. That means it has to be some kind of kernel flag, and everybody who wants to put in non-functional information (e.g. credits) has to use it. This would require a fairly broad concensus...
--

Re:It's open source

[chown]

To make sure this splash stuff stays informative and doesn't get irritating we need a generic way to turn it all off, and that method has to act early in the boot sequence. That means it has to be some kind of kernel flag, and everybody who wants to put in non-functional information (e.g. credits) has to use it. This would require a fairly broad concensus...

Actually, I think it would be a good idea to make a kernel mod or somesuch that creates something like a /proc/credits or /proc/splash or what have you. If you want, you can change your boot sequence so it gets displayed, or you could just look at it later. There's obviously no way to force people to use it, but it's a decent idea and I think the linux community in general would be fairly willing to use such a mechanism for things like this.

Thoughts? I doubt anybody will read this anyway, it's like 2 levels deep :)

Maybe if I get around to it I can make it tonight, but what's more likely is that I'll just go to bed. Oh well :)

Re:It's open source

[MrJay]

Furthermore, just because it happens under Solaris and NT does not mean I want to see it happen under Linux and it's various distributions.

Sponsored by, not ads

[jezzball]

They're sponsored by. I don't see what's wrong with that. There are tons of mentions of other companies/places in my boot up sequence (NET4, etc).

I kind of like it, it shows that reiserfs is getting commercial help.
ls: .sig: File not found.

Re:Sponsored by, not ads

[mosch]

And besides, we have the source, were somebody to get obnoxious with it, and start displaying ads, I think we can all be sure that there'd be a common patch that'd get distributed, to remove all ads.

These aren't ads though, these are about as obtrusive as the mention of swansea university that many of us see on boot.
----------------------------

Not that odd

[djweis]

It's similar to copyright messages printed by the driver. I'm willing to look at them as long as the software is getting written.

I don't see anything wrong

[mind21_98]

I don't see anything wrong with the sponsorship information above. The sponsors who sponsored ReiserFS are just saying in bootup messages that they actually sponsored development of it. Now if they came up with big 468x60 banner ads while using framebuffer mode, then I would be concerned.

Since new sponsorship information isn't retrieved from the Internet, this shouldn't be a problem.

Windows Sponsorship

[spazimodo]

New BSOD message:

This Blue Screen of Death has been brought to you by Colt Handguns. Colt, because you'll never be getting those PowerPoint presentations back!

-Spazimodo

Fsck the millennium, we want it now.

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[Ominous the Forebodi]

Wow! That gives quite a new meaning to "point and click", don't you think?

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[bemis]

I don't remember the specifics of this -- but didn't MS plan (or actually implement) for NT5? (win2k) ... as i recall it was just "customizable graphic BSODs -- for more user friendly crashes" or something like that ... but the joke at the time it was announced had to do with people making them into ads ...? maybe i'm on crack .. it's been known to happen before. bemis

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[Foul Smelling Pig]

Unfortunately this will never happen, because Colt decided not to offer their gear to law-abiding citizens anymore. As an interesting sideline, did you guys and gals know that a prominent gun control advocate uses the services of armed bodyguards who then "forget" to take their weapon with them after an appearance at a public venue? Maybe it's just me, but that is kind of stoopid.

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[phil reed]

Wasn't that a Segfault article?


...phil

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[Phil Gregory]

Smith & Wesson: The original "point and click" interface.


--Phil (Well, no one else had said it yet...)

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[Fishstick]

>as i recall it was just "customizable graphic BSODs

Think this was a joke that circulated on the net. See microsoft customizable BSOD announcement

I there was a freeware program (BSOD Properties) floating around that let you customize BSOD somewhat, but it basically let you change the background and text colors. Doubt this is what you were thinking of but was somewhat related.

BSOD properties

Re:Windows Sponsorship

[bemis]

oh yeah .. sorry .. my bad ... (all those drugs my mom took while she was pregnant are starting to show) ... i *KNEW* i'd read something like that in the past though. bemis

When will it end?

[a2fan]

Ugh, it seems I can't do anything, go anywhere without being bombarded by some kind of advertising.

This is sort of like PBS - no commercials? The sponsorship blurbs sure sound like commercials.

Re:When will it end?

[AndyL]

Remember when PBS shows would end with the word THANK YOU on the screen and an anoucer would say "This show was brought to you buy Toyota and viewers like you."
Now they skip the whole thank you bit and just run an add for Toyota. (Slightly modified so you know it's still a 'sponsership'.
I don't think anyone would realy have a serious problem with one-line thank you's in their start up. But what if they get to be multi-line? Or graphical? or even audio or video?

Could you just remove the adds?

[law]

This is open source and all; is there any reason not to just hack out the names?

Re:Could you just remove the adds?

[Oarboat_7]

Naw. Have some fun with it. Don't just remove the company names. Replace them with their competitors names.

Re:Could you just remove the adds?

[Anonymous Coward]

so it would read:
sponsored by www.riaa.com and microsoft.com
?

Aww...

[kwsNI]

Aww, the price some people have to pay for free software...

Hey, it that's what it takes to get these companies to support a free software project, I'll tolerate them.

kwsNI

Re:Aww...

[stakk]

Hey, it that's what it takes to get these companies to support a free software project, I'll tolerate them.

Careful what you say there that could be taken the wrong way by other names-withheld-companies. These are sponsorships that show up in the clockworkings of linux, they won't do much after the system is up and running for days and days. I can easily see how this can get out of hand and I would agree that this sort of name plugging is ok, it could get worse and look like a company just shelled over 30k to fill a line on the screen. Think command prompt here...
Though just saying "I will deal with it so long as I get my software working correctly." is a bit dangerous. The software is free but its development needs funding from someplace.

-stakk

Ads are nothing really that new ...

[SuperDuG]

watch your kernel messages when you first boot linux up ... I focus mainly on the networking protocols (ex. Appletalk and IPX/SPX) they both give advertisements of who created them ...

When you load uup any certain distribution it will give the website of the distro in the boot sequence as well. Or it will already have netscape configured to go to their site.

In the world today finding a domain name and then making useful code really isn't that uncommon ...

Re:kinda cool

[djweis]

Considering how many times you see the boot screen in NT, that's a big missed opportunity!

It bothers you?

[bjb]

This is in the /boot sequence/ .. those words which you can happily ignore while they zip past your screen while loading the system. It's not like a banner ad which gets in the way, and quite frankly, if someone made a driver and put "© 2000 Driversoft" in it, is that so bad?

Now if it opened up a splash screen, that's a story. This is whining.

--

Re:It bothers you?

[Ed Avis]

Yeah, but it gets in the way of other more useful and informative messages.

Also, if more and more bits of kernel start displaying sponsorship messages, you'll get the problem that the messages displayed early on are scrolled off the screen within a few milliseconds. Already, even on a fairly slow machine, there are plenty of kernel messages which you never get the chance to read, because they scroll away so quickly.

It could become like MS-DOS, where every TSR or program run from autoexec.bat felt it necessary to display some sort of message. Then to make your message stand out from the rest, you had to put several blank lines above and below (Microsoft does this). Or display it in eye-catching colours, a big blue rectangle perhaps (eg Logitech's mouse driver). Finally it got to the stage where programs would clear the screen just to make sure that their useless copyright messages got noticed.

Unix was designed on the basis of not printing spurious chatty messages, so it's easy to tell when something really does require your attention. Let's keep it that way.

Re:It bothers you?

[pe1rxq]

Also, if more and more bits of kernel start displaying sponsorship messages, you'll get the problem that the messages displayed early on are scrolled off the screen within a few milliseconds. Already, even on a fairly slow machine, there are plenty of kernel messages which you never get the chance to read, because they scroll away so quickly.

Try this: dmesg

Jeroen

Re:It bothers you?

[Psiren]

Indeed... or you can generally just use Shift-PgUp on the console to scroll back. This won't work after X has been loaded, but that's a minor problem.

Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.

Re:It bothers you?

[mdonaghy]

Unfortunately, dmesg doesn't show -all- the messages that are output'ed to the console during bootup, at least the last time I checked (one of the RH 6.x distributions).

Re:It bothers you?

[Foddrick]

Am I the only that used to hack all of the software that loaded at boot time to remove these annoying messages ?

Re:It bothers you?

[mdonaghy]

If in runlevel 3 on a Red Hat box (at least in early 6.x series), once the console login window came up this doesn't work.

Re:It bothers you?

[pe1rxq]

You probably mean the messages that show up after init has started. Those aren't kernel messages, they are the output of the various deamons and scripts being started.

Jeroen

Re:It bothers you?

[Psiren]

Yeah, well, RedHat like to put pretty colours and such like on their bootup messages. Hide the scary stuff from the dimwits... they can't take it. No thanks, I'll stick to Slackware.

Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.

Re:It bothers you?

[whoop]

Need we go through each and every step to debug a system?

1. Ctrl-S, Ctrl-Q - pause/resume the scrolling messages on bootup.
   
2. Shift-PgUp, Shift-PgDn - scroll back/forward through the messages, most useful after the messages have been paused (see #1).
   
3. less /var/log/messages - if a service fails on startup, usually it will also output the information in this fail or others in /var/log.
   
4. ps ax - after bootup, make sure needed processes are running, in case you missed a failure and the screen cleared (RH runlevel 3) or X starts (RH runlevel 5).
   

Ok?

Re:It bothers you?

[rufo]

So you can actually read all those boot messages as they whiz by? Don't know about x86 hardware, but on my B&W G3 400MHz LinuxPPC loads so fast you can't really even read the kernel messages... better off just running dmesg if you want to read them.

Re:It bothers you?

[Tower]

>Real programmers use ps auxww

nah: ps -ef

Re:It bothers you?

[Eagle7]

"Already, even on a fairly slow machine, there are plenty of kernel messages which you never get the chance to read, because they scroll away so quickly." dmesg | more

Re:It bothers you?

[Ed Avis]

So the kernel should display loads of messages at boot time, but if you want to have any chance of reading them, you have to run dmesg?

If so, why bother printing the messages at all? Why not just log them quietly and let the user run dmesg later?

The reason why the kernel prints messages at boot time is to help diagnose hardware problems and other serious things like failing to mount root. That's one of the reasons why booting is much more chatty than any other part of Linux - you need to see the messages immediately since you may not get the chance to run dmesg. So it's best to make sure the important messages get printed (as well as logged), and remain on screen. The less important stuff can, of course, be stored away somewhere to be inspected later.

Re:It bothers you?

[Mr 44]

Unix was designed on the basis of not printing spurious chatty messages, so it's easy to tell when something really does require your attention. Let's keep it that way.

People say stuff like this all the time, and I always wonder what they are talking about. Do you really think any OS was "designed on the basis of printing spurious messages"? Of course not.

Given your example of MS-DOS, as more 3rd party companies wrote drivers for the OS, they all wanted a little credit.

Now the same thing is happening with linux, and of course the slashdot crowd is going to get all religious about it. Advertising in the holy temple of Linux is sacriledge! Burn them at the stake!

Whatever.

Like it or not, this is a capitalist society. As more companies become involved with a project (be it Linux, DOS, whatever), they will each want to promote their name.

Luckily, the same capilist forces will result in a backlash against any company who goes too far on the obnoxious scale. And, as others have pointed out, someone will distribute a patch to remove any truly excessive splash screens.

Re:It bothers you?

[mce]

Unix was designed on the basis of not printing spurious chatty messages, so it's easy to tell when something really does require your attention.

Sounds like Windows to me. Windows does not tell me anything while booting, even if I instruct it to be verbose. Linux will chat away at top speed. In fact, that's what I like: I want to know what the box is doing and whether the CPU/BIOS/... suffers from known bugs.

--

Re:It bothers you?

[shepd]

So when my kernel panics at boot (like it did when I compiled bttv into kernel 2.0.0pre8 a long time ago) I can somehow run dmesg? About 5 or 6 other things from 5 or 6 other separate pieces of kernel code scrolled past before the panic. Lets see:

5 things x 5 lines (with ads) == 25 lines. Add about 5 lines for the kernel panic info, and there's NO WAY I can see what is wrong (25 lines default screen size).

5 things x 1.5 lines (normal size) == 7 lines. Add about 5 lines for the kernel panic info, and that is just 12 lines. Woohoo! I can see that my bttv driver is loaded.

And shift-pgup doesn't work on an MDA card (why bother with anything better for a server?).

As you see, ads will annoy the HELL out of any sysadmin running cheapass hardware. Sure it might be "his fault" for not buying good stuff, but why make anyone's life harder? If you want to add credits in try:

-- ReiserFS loaded. dd/mm/yy. Visit www.sponors.reiserfs.org for sponsorship info.

One line. Clean. Has a hint of advertisement in it, but as long as it is less than 80 chars long, it doesn't matter. The kernel messages are ONLY for debugging purposes. They aren't there for personal glory. Thank God Linux is open source, if the trend of ads in kernel messages continues, I'm willing to bet there will be special "cut-the-crap" kernel patches availiable. :-)

I'm happy you wrote some free software for me. Thanks. But just as when someone gives you a gift they don't tell you every time they meet you that THEY gave you THAT gift, you don't have to tell me every time my linux box boots that YOU gave me THAT software. Argh.... :-|

Re:It bothers you?

[timster]

That is of course a configurable option. /etc/sysconfig/init , change BOOTUP value to "verbose". Of course, in Slackware, if I wanted to change that, I'd have to rewrite all the boot scripts. No thanks...

Re:It bothers you?

[sysop]

It would be much better if modules could show their ads during the shutdown sequence ..

Then rebooting or turning off would be just like the end of a movie. :)

Re:It bothers you?

[pe1rxq]

Nice thing about Slackwar is that you wouldn't have to change it......

Can we stop bashing eachother on the head about distros now?

Jeroen

Re:It bothers you?

[Ed Avis]

Yeah, and you wouldn't get to know what the box is doing if the information is crowded off the screen by lots of advertising.

Re:It bothers you?

[mce]

In my post I did not take position w.r.t. the advertising. All I did was comment on the statement that Unix was designed not to be chatty.

--

Don't tell Metallica!

[kmcardle]

May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: Journaling sponsored by MP3.com
Don't tell Metallica! We don't want them to publish a list of Linux users! :)

--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way

cd

[jbarnett]

Kernel Panic: 0x321 segement out of range: please vist http://www.hotgrits.com: flushing core...
while you wait for core dump to be flushed to disk please vist: http://www.hotgrits.com/ode.html

Rebooting... This unexpected kernel crash was made possiable though donations made by Hot Grits, Inc. Please vist them at http://www.hotgrits.com

You left one out.

[Black Parrot]

May 3 00:59:54 nega-0 kernel: Send exotic beers to lubricate next release
--

No big deal

[Mark_MacRae]

How many times do you boot up?

Re:No big deal

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

Actually, due to lack of UPS, the presence of small children, and lack of need, the Linux box in the house isn't on 24/7. Thus, it gets booted 4-5 times a week.

Now, when we start actively using it as a firewall, the game changes, neh?

ReiserFS

[Signal 11]

Well, I'm not nearly as upset about sponsorship/copyright notes like this as I am about certain BIOS manufacturers embedding advertisement during the *real* bootup/POST sequence.

If slashdot should be reporting anything, it's these people. For example, some (many?) of the Gigabyte boards pop up advertisements when you start your system. How quaint - no way to remove them unless you're a BIOS developer.

Re:ReiserFS

[madstork2000]

I thought the BIOS "ads" were generally open so manufacturers or common blokes (with enough tinkering) could change them, with a custom "splash" logo. at boot up. The bioses I had that did this had provisions in the update to facilate a small graphic (gif i think). Unfortunately that was a looooong time aga, and I haven't bother to play with it since then so I could be totally mistaken.

-MS

Fine by me

[hatless]

Seems okay by me (1) as long as they don't pollute the license of the code by requiring that they be left intact permanently, and (2) as long as they don't add instability by changing video mode, using sound, etc.

mount;yes;yes;gasp;umount

[hoss10]

mount;yes;yes;gasp;umount

brought to you by www.pr0n.com

------------------------------------------------ -
"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -

Re:mount;yes;yes;gasp;umount

[dskoll]

Actually, the whole thing goes like this:

touch; unzip; finger; mount; yes; yes; gasp; umount.

I'm sure the kinky among us can find some more UNIX commands to put in there. biff or cat, anyone?

Re:mount;yes;yes;gasp;umount

[ruud]

What about sleep? :-)
--

Re:mount;yes;yes;gasp;umount

[GoRK]

how about:

login; look; touch; make > out; touch; grep; unzip; finger; mount; fsck; fsck; yes; gasp; yes; unouunt; wait; mount; fsck; fsck; gasp; gasp; unmount; sleep; logout

you could throw 'tee' in there and another process to really spice things up!!!

why should it end?

[kevin lyda]

they wrote it, or paid to get it written. why not?

you're welcome to edit the source to remove it, just like you can do with all the other stuff that gets spewed. no one forces you to have them there, you're within your rights to change them.

Hmm...perhaps a little disturbing...

[SgtPepper]

But not totally suprising. How else is "Free Software" going to have any financing? It /is/ a little...disturbing, but as someone else pointing out has long as it's not 800x600 32bit colour frambuffer ads, it's all good, besides you can always stdout > /dev/null. Or simply ignore it. This is just a continuing trend towards "comercialism" that sould have been expected. It happens to every technology has it hits maturity.

Don't sweat it.

As long as I don't see "ext2 brought to you by McDonald's, get your free tux with your happy meal today!" every time I boot up ;)

Re:Hmm...perhaps a little disturbing...

[BorgDrone]

As long as I don't see "ext2 brought to you by McDonald's, get your free tux with your happy meal today!" every time I boot up ;)

Why not ? I would love a free tux with my happy meal! ;-)
---

When I install Windows...

[tak amalak]

All I see is the name 'Microsoft' all over the place. WTF? Same thing with MacOS and Apple... something fishy is going on here.
--

Re:When I install Windows...

[Valdrax]

Actually, you don't actually see anything about Apple when you boot the Mac OS -- just the little cubist smiling Mac logo with "Mac OS" or "Mac OS [version #]" under it nowdays. Odd, that. I guess that, unlike Microsoft, they're confident people using the system actually know who makes it.

(I mean, duh! Who doesn't know Microsoft makes Windows?)

And the problem being....?

[HiQ]

• They're removeable
• This is no different than the messages displayed by mousedrivers, BIOS etc..

Try finding a real problem......
How to make a sig
without having an idea

Advertising?

[jmccay]

This is just the beginning. Before you know it MS will find a way to advertise MS products in the boot up sequence. Think about it. Stuff like this usually starts simple like mentioning sponcers. Gradually over a period of time it sponcership increases, and eventually it'll awitch to "buy this ...". I guess that's a bad side about going mainstream.

I wonder how much we could charge MS to advertise in the Linux boot up sequence only to have us comment it out later. Not a bad way to waste their money.

Is the source avaible so it could be commented out? If you comment it out the sponcers name still stays in the code, but it is not displayed on boot. Then you can say you didn't remove the code. You just stopped it from displaying.

We shall see what happens with this. I really hope this doesn't become a common practice! Another good reaosn to compile your the stuff yourself. ;)

Re:Advertising?

[kz45]

I don't see a problem with ads in linux. There needs to be a revenue stream somewhere! EVERYTHING can't be free. Hard-working programmers should get SOME compensation.

sponsorship vs. ads

[bfields]

it's more like sponsorship than ads, which on one hand is a cool way to finance development, but where is this gonna end?

Um, could someone explain the difference between the two?

Also, let's do a thought experiment: let's say every company and individual that made a significant contribution to the kernel code inserted a "sponsored by" message into the boot sequence. How useful would those boot messages continue to be? This just isn't the place for advertisements (oh, excuse me, announcements of sponsorship).

Re:sponsorship vs. ads

[CubeDweller]

Sponsorship, aka underwriting, is basically like giving money to Public Television. The recipient of the money can say "Thank you to ??? for supporting us...", but they can't endorse you or your products, or encourage people to use you and your products over your competition.

Advertisement is like TV commmercials where the whole purpose is trying to people to buy and use your products and services.

Subliminal Advertising

[the_other_one]

Most boot messages fly past so fast Coke that nobody notices them. Would embeded messages You need Caffine be as effective as Coke subliminal advertising was?

Re:Subliminal Advertising

[DrSkwid]

how about

loading....

Vote Bush

.....

etc..
.oO0Oo.

Re:Subliminal Advertising

[arcade]

That was a strange experience.

I didn't even notice, until after I'd done it. I read your message, took my bottle of pepsi, and quenched my thirst.

Then, I reread your message.. and suddenly it striked me that I had read your message and done (nearly) what it told me (Drink something with caffeeine!:)

yikes!


--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - arcade@kvine-nospam.sdal.com - arcade@efnet

Re:Subliminal Advertising

[Phil Wilkins]

Dammit, I need a cup of tea now...!

Re:Subliminal Advertising

[Deimos_]

Yeah, but when it comes to the agreements of the payment were, 'you include this code with your driver',

fprintf (stdout, "Coca-Cola, Kidney stones never tasted this good\n");
sleep (5);

that could suck...

Where do you draw the line?

[parc]

OK, boot messages are one thing. But here's a scenario for you:
I write a really cool filesystem driver. To support its developement, Microsoft gives me $5000. They stipulate that I have to advertise that they supported it by inserting a "sponsored by Microsoft" message in the write() system call. When the message pops up(it's full-screen of course!), the kernel spinlocks for 15 seconds. This seems like the logical path for advertisements to take, at least from an advertiser's point of view. Force the user to see the message.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[Tet]

I write a really cool filesystem driver [...] They stipulate that I have to advertise that they supported it by inserting a "sponsored by Microsoft" message in the write() system call [...] the kernel spinlocks for 15 seconds.

The chances of that ever getting past Linus and into a mainstream kernel are somewhere around zero. If it's distributed as a separate module (as source), it'll be a day (two at the outside) before someone releases a patch to remove the advertising. If it's not distributed as source, I (and many others) won't be using it anyway, so I don't care how much advertising you put in...

This is like copyright messages..

[erlando]

As long as these messages are non-obtrusive(sp?), i.e not requiring any user-interaction I see nothing wrong with it. They could show an ascii-banner filling the screen for all I care. I don't see it anyway as my server boots automatically and with the monitor off...:-b

By being sponsored developers can (and will) put more time into their projects. Result..? Higher quality software (in theory ;-) )..

This is the way sponsorship (as this is) and advertising (as this isn't) works. A corp give you money and expect to see their name somewhere. Fair enough. If they want to put advertising in my boot-sequence, fine. As long as the boot-sequence isn't stopped or hindered in any way.

Re:It's nice to only see one company in my bootup

[pe1rxq]

Didn't the BSD license have a ADVERTISING clause???

Jeroen

This comment was made possible by caffeinne and fastfood......

kernelpanic

[CBravo]

kernelpanic: Startbutton sponsored by Microsoft

Advertising-supported linux?

[genki]

I was actually thinking of something like this, but on a different line - what about a linux distrobution supported by advertising during the install sequence? It'd be a way for comapines who don't want to support themselves based upon boxed sales to still make money through linux...

---------------------------------

Polluting the output stream

[handorf]

My biggest problem with this is that it pollutes the stream I try to parse as it goes buy.

Somebody said that they ignore all those messages as they scroll by, but I don't. I almost ALWAYS wind up checking dmesg or the logs to be sure everything started OK. I make a LOT of changes to my system and I want to know when I break something.

"Oops, sound drivers didn't load, what did I just change?" instead of "CRAP! My MP3s won't play! What have I changed this week?"

Admittedly, it's a minor annoyance, but dmesg has a relatively small buffer. I'd hate for the whole boot sequence not to fit because everyone feels the need to thank their sponsors.

Re:Polluting the output stream

[Medieval]

Then modify the dmesg buffer. Make it larger.

Use the Source, Luke.

Re:Polluting the output stream

[handorf]

How much larger? How many sponsorship lines do I have to tolerate in dmesg? And when I load up my X server. And in my Sendmail logs. And...

It could easily get unmanagable. If every kernel module I loaded had 3 lines of sponsorship information, I'd NEVER find any useful information in there. :-(

Good for both parties

[spiralx]

Given the licensing terms of the GPL, the money required for commerical Linux ventures has to come from somewhere. The first way that was found was through support deals a la Red Hat, SuSe et al, and now these people have found a new way, through sponsership. It's a valid option, and one long tried and tested within all kinds of markets.

In today's world having a recognisable "name" is of paramount importance to any corporation which wants to make money. A product branded with a well-recognised name will outsell a superior or cheaper one lacking a name, as a trip into any supermarket will show you. And in the rocky world of dot-coms, having the leading name in their field is probably the only way they'll make any money in the near future.

So IMHO you can expect to see more of this kind of sponsership in the future, since it makes sense for all concerned - the project gains some money to pay developers and so on and the sponser gains recognition and "mindshare" (ugh) for a relatively small outlay. And considering some of the budgets the dot-coms have for advertising, this is extremely small change.

Linux software ad POLL

[Anonymous Coward]

There's actually a poll running on the topic of advertising in Linux software, the result was quite interesting, particularly given the breadth of questions asked. Check it out!

This is new?!

[drix]

Name-dropping like this has been in the kernel for years and no one saw fit to complain. Mebbe because it's high up on the dmesg and not being loaded as a module (with user interaction), but does this little line look familiar?

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0.
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0

I've been using Linux since 1.2 and IIRC it's been there since at least then. There's also ads for some Apple stuff in one of the appletalk modules I think but I don't have that one compiled ATM.


--

Linus allowed this?

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

I can't believe Linus allowed "sponsored by MP3.com" to be applied to the master source tree. I won't if he'd take a patch removing it...
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

Re:Linus allowed this?

[ruud]

I can't believe Linus allowed "sponsored by MP3.com" to be applied to the master source tree.

He didn't. ReiserFS is not part of the official kernel.

--

Re:Linus allowed this?

[Spiv]

I can't believe Linus allowed "sponsored by MP3.com" to be applied to the master source tree.

Uh, no, he didn't. Reiserfs isn't in the master source tree -- it's looking like it will eventually be included, possibly sometime during 2.4.x and almost definitely in 2.5, but it's certainly not in there yet. The code still needs a bit of work, I believe.

-Spiv.

Re:Linus allowed this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig sounded interesting so I went to read that story (as many should I think) ...

Certainly it should be posted on /. so people can comment here... but then, would they feel happy commenting in a place where their comments can be used without permission?

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net.

.. only when it suits you, eh /. ?

Re:Linus allowed this?

[jabber]

ReiserFS TO-DO list:

#1: Remove 'sponsorship message'.
#2..#n: Everything else

--

I have no problem with giving credit where credit is due, but the original article asks how far this can go. The next step after 'on-boot' messages is application splash-screens (sure they serve to inform and distract from the tima an app uses to start up). Splash-screens that push upgrades and companies are an advertisement.

Where it goes from there is anyone's guess. An active desktop that acts like one of those 'free' Internet serveces where half your screen is devoted to a parade of banner ads??

Each time you run ls you see a text line pushing you to check Red Hat's site for latest sources? Or maybe their current share price?

Open source is the key to preventing this sort of thing, since with compiled code, one it's in there, it's IN there. Maybe a fair trade-off is to put the credits into a standard log file. Each time you install a new app or tool, the acknowledgement gets appended to the 'credits' file, that you can view at your leisure and discresion; without it taking up boot-time screen space.

This would give two benefits. 1) You could redirect it to /dev/null if you don't care, or 2) when things go wrong, you can correlate the error-producing widget to the company/resource that might be able to help. Plus, the file would read like the closing credits in a movie...

OS Kernel : Linus Torvalds
Best Boy: Alan Cox
Package Manager: Red Hat
Gnome Desktop: Miguel de Icaza and friends
Visual Effects: 3dfx
GNU Software appears courtesy of Richard Stallman
DeCSS code NOT produced by the Motion Picture Association of America
This OS brought to you by the letters S and B (as in Speach and Beer), and by the number 1.

Fin.

I'm sick of...

[Haven]

I'm really getting sick of that Nasa guy spamming me with his e-mail address every time I bring up my 3c509 3com NIC card. Where will we draw the line?

Re:I'm sick of...

[Fishstick]

Yeah, what about that blatant plug for Goddard Space Flight Center and the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences!? Sheesh, guy puts in a few hundred thousand hours writing and maintaining network drivers for Linux and he has the gall to actually put a plug in for his boss? The nerve!

Man, at least I don't have to boot my linux box for much except hardware changes and new kernels. Imagine if NT used drivers from Donald Becker then I'd have to see his spam on a daily basis! :-) (Note for the humor-impaired, this is called sarcasm)

s/won't/wonder

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Whoops, my fingers got a little distracted...
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

where will it stop

[jbarnett]

Really though this isn't to bad, they help fund the development of an Open Source/Free Software project and they should get some menation, either in the README file or when it comes into play (which just happens to be at boot time). I have D. Becker (the Ethernet guy) in my kernel message, and I see nothing wrong with that, he wrote a lot of drivers (and some I use at boot time) and should get credit for that. If a company gives a crap load of money to pay programmers to develop OpenSource/Free software, then they should get some menation from it.

This right now isn't that bad. But my question is HOW far can this been taken? If overdone this could be a bad thing. Having everyone from Kool-Aid to Hot Grits, Inc. posting into your kernel message can be a bad thing. (Not that I am against Kool-Aid or Hot Grits or anything, actucally that Kool-Aid bowl of punch makes me uncomfortable)

"Oh oh, did you see it, what was that error"

"Not sure dude, lets check dmesg here in a minute, OH dam do you ever get that no so fresh feeling?"

"Uh what dude, want to get some Pizza from Hot Grits, Inc. they serve the best pizza in town"

"What the hell are you talking about"

And it is techinally possiable to do a huge ass Frame Buffer Ad, but is this what we really want?

The thing I like about Free (as in speech software) is that the only things included are for techinal reasons. Everything that is built into vim is there for a techinal reason, and I like that. What I hate is no-techinal stuff in programs, like if one day I load up vim and it asks me for a serial number, screw that, that is no reason to have a serial number there (even if it was commerical software) because it serves no techinal purpose. Also if I loaded up vim to edit a system file and it poped an svga full color ad in my face that I had to watch for 30 seconds before it let me admin my machine, I would be seriously pissed.

If a company supports free software develop, they do deverse credit, props and a shout out from their homeboys. As long as they do it someone reasonable, it is cool. When they start doing Full screen ads though, that could cause some problems.

Yeah, swell...

[Greyfox]

Now I don't even have to take the memory hit of Netscape to get my daily advertising fix. I guess it's fortunate that I don't reboot that often.

I suppose you could get a corporation that wants features added to fund your development. Of course, the corporations always want more money and would probably jump at the opportunity to to make an extra buck by putting an ad or three in.

The programmers of Reiserfs could do us all a favor and patent advertising in the OS boot-up sequence...

Boot Sequence, folks

[rjamestaylor]

It's the boot sequence. This is Linux. Thus spoke Linus Torvalds:

How many times a week do you reboot?

Let's not forget this isn't Windows -- the "ads" will rarely be displayed on your console (unless you dual boot often). Save the hysterics (no gender offence intended) for real battles.

PBS commercials

[The Queen]

Exactly. CNet.com and some insurance company have their COMMERCIALS playing at the end of every show they sponsor. Granted it hasn't gotten as bad as regular television - yet - but it still bothers me. I do realize though that they're feeling the pinch to convert to digital and they probably need any extra sponsorship $$$ they can get...

The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk

Advertising

[NIVRAM]

I seem to remember a /. post a while ago about Bios companies planning on selling advertising that would be put in the Bios and displayed just after the system posts.... anyone else remember this or have any information on it?

-From the horses mouth

Re:Advertising

[PigleT]

OK, my $0.02's worth...

The kernel is open-source. You can edit the adverts out, can't you?

Next thing you know .. how's about a version of junkbuster for the kernel? ;)

~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

This is a slippery slope; look at PBS...

[Deven]

Sure, it starts out as simple "sponsorship" messages. Right now it's only a minor nuisance. Later (as another poster mentioned), the output could start getting more and more gaudy and intrusive as in the world of DOS TSR's.

Eventually, it could degenerate as much as PBS has. PBS claims to be "commercial-free" public television, yet more and more of their programs have a professionally-produced 10-20 second piece from the sponsoring company, indistinguishable from any other commercial on television, except in that it's more likely to be a soft sell. What happened to simply announcing a list of names of companies and individuals? When did it become necessary to show company logos and finally full-motion professional video clips?

I'm not as concerned with the current messages so much as what this could become...

Re:This is a slippery slope; look at PBS...

[Amokscience]

That would be because they need money, no? Might want to remember that when everyone wants handouts... Someone pays for 'free' stuff at some point.

Where it all began?

[seppy]

This post sponsored by the letter U and the number 2

Not Too Worrisome Now, But...

[GeekLife.com]

Are you sure it's not just that the current sponsoring companies are generally "cool"? Because if this sort of thing is accepted, it be more difficult to remove (once the precedent is set)?

How would this go over if, say, Microsoft joined in?

(It also makes me think of the PBS Ads...er...sponsorships that have slowly evolved more and more into the exact same ads we're seeing on the standard networks.)
-----

Re:Not Too Worrisome Now, But...

[Oarboat_7]

To drift slightly off topic (but really to amplify what the previous commenter said) the 'creeping commercialism' on the PBS network is a threat to look out for.

I can remember in the old days of the "Prairie Home Companion Show" that Garrision Kellior would mention Cargill as a sponsor of the program. He always worked in a little humor, implying that what Cargill produced was ambiguous (shoehorns? canned beets? ...). These days he just reads whatever their marketing people tell him to read off the card. It seems chillingly humorless to anybody who remembers the old jokes.

So yes, it's one of those 'slippery slope' things.

Re:Not Too Worrisome Now, But...

[Wah]

(It also makes me think of the PBS Ads...er...sponsorships that have slowly evolved more and more into the exact same ads we're seeing on the standard networks.)

That's 'cause they ARE the same thing. (advertising: media used to make something known) The difference is in how they are acquired. And how much they represent the media in which they are included. Most NetTV (mainstream media) spots are sold to the highest biddder, PBS searches out sponsors (I believe). Advertising is going to be a part of our lives for a long time, now we just need to find the kind we like...yea, right.
--

Re:Not Too Worrisome Now, But...

[Deliverator]

What are you talking about? The only serious advertising on PHC is from Land's End. There are, I think, two commercials in the show. The Powdermilk Biscuits and Beeboparoobop Rhubarb Pie commercials are gags.

Do you really think that Sandy Beach, Amanda Reconwith, and Pete Moss (mentioned at the end of the broadcast) are real people also?

--

who cares..

[hanulec]

i don't reboot often.. and if some sponsor thinks this is worth wild well then they are stupid..

10:01am up 92 days, 11:40, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00

Not too bad...

[Uruk]

Nah, it's not too bad. If you have PPP compression modules, and some of the TCP/IP modules they talk about how the software was developed and sponsored by Berkely at boot time.

There's nothing wrong with giving credit where credit is due. If ReiserFS wouldn't have existed without SuSE and MP3.com, I'm ok with watching their names scroll by. (quickly)

What's going to piss me off is if you have a message that says something like:
(etc. etc.) Sponsored by MP3.com - visit mp3.com today for the latest in digital music - come see how the MP3 revolution allows garage bands to suck all over the world!

or some such advertising blurb.

But then another part of me doesn't even care. I'm not sure about the specific license on reiserfs, but for the vast majority of things that provide source code, if it bugs me I'll hack it out. I bet it's a 5 minute hack to get rid of that stuff. (remove a few kprintf's I believe - but maybe it's done some other way)

Why not delete credits. Authors knew risks of OSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kinda late to be getting cold feet about what users might do with your opened source code. Demand recognition? May as well demand payment too and go proprietary. There's no room for glory hounds in the OSS world, the success of the code is its own goal. Who wrote it? It matters not. If this bothers you, there's the door, leave the OSS movement now.

Re:Whoop-ti-freakin-do

[drwiii]

but Pater, how do you know that those netcard drivers weren't written by some guy named Jim Smith and are sponsored by Donald Becker Photography?

:-)

Non-issue

[ocelotbob]

This issue really is a non-issue. Who cares if a couple lines of text are scrolled across the screen that tell who to thank for a good piece of code (or curse at for horrible code). Now I'm with a few earlier posts who say that the line is drawn at 1024x768 32 bit bitmaps for buying Natalie Portmans on a Stick, but, chances are, I only watch the boot sequence when I add a new piece of hardware, as Linux is rock solid. Now, putting an ad in the BIOS boot sequence, it would probably be an ad for post-windows reeboot stress syndrome counselling, that would be different.
Hey, it's 60 or so bytes, and considering the blatent advertising in Windows (ever use AOL? Then IE is permanently branded with an ad for AOL), we got to start worrying about more important issues, like figuring out how to get a beowulf of 1Ghz Athlons in order to play the most killer game of Q III of all time.

rm -f CREDITS

[Rozzin]

"Don't delete the sponsorship messages! Yes, it's open source which gives you the ability to remove the tags just like you have the ability to run `rm -f CREDITS' on every tarball you extract."

And what's wrong with me removing CREDITS files from my own system?

"I know I'd be pissed off if someone used my code without giving me credit, or if there was a renegade patch running around that REMOVED my line in the credits."

There's a difference between removing the CREDITS file from my disk and distributing something with a modified credits-list.

Personally, I really dislike having to look at a credits-list or a splash-screen or other such things every time I load a piece of software, which is why I don't inflict such things upon my own users.

Having an accurate list of credits that people can view is different than having a list of credits that people must view.

Hm. I suppose that the CREDITS file and a list of credits in the software's init routine aren't the same, after all.
Hm. Why not put a list of all of the sponsors in a `SPONSORS' file?

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[ibpooks]

The point is that the author wanted credit for the software where everyone would see it. C'mon, the only payment the author/sponsor is asking for is two lines of text on boot up; I think that's a legitimate price to pay for FREE software.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[Rozzin]

"C'mon, the only payment the author/sponsor is asking for is two lines of text on boot up"

Counting the 12 names on the credits-page of the reiserfs web site, at 2 lines per contributor, that's 24 lines. This reminds me of the FSF's note on why the BSD advertising clause became a Bad Thing.

But, regarless of the degree of severity of annoyance-features, speaking as a free-software-developer: why does someone intentionally add inconvenience for their users? Actually, hell--I'll ask that just as a software-developer. To say something like, `you can only use my software if you keep this CREDITS-file on-disk at all times, and read it before every invokation of the software', is mean and wrong. And, no, it doesn't matter how much inconvenience or annoyance my users are willing to tolerate, I'm writing software for them to help make their world better.

A friend of mine recently bought a used computer with Windows 95 on it, and he wanted to reinstall the system to try to fix some broken aspects of the system. He had a perfectly legal Windows-95 installation-disc. When the installation-routine asked for the registration number, we typed it in, and it was rejected. We tried other numbers, and they were all rejected until we reformatted the drive and had a fresh go at it.

A while back, I discovered that Microsoft Word refused to open multiple file with the same name simultaneously, even if they were in different directories.

The amount of intentional difficulty that had been built into these systems is just mind-boggling.... That is not the right thing to do.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[AME]

I think that's a legitimate price to pay for FREE software.

How much is the maximum legitimate price for free software?

The problem is that you have to draw a line someplace. How much is too much? 3 lines? 5 lines? 10 lines? 100?... After all, it's free software, so what's the harm in popping up a nag screen when the user starts his mail client to remind him of important free software projects? The user's not paying for it, after all.

As far as I'm concerned, bootup progs should get one line, unless they have legitimate (as in, "important for debugging purposes") information which requires more to convey.

When I go to dmesg, it's because I want to figure out why something or another is happening. In short, I'm looking for information about my system, not ads. If every boot prog had a single line of useful information and an additional three lines of sponsorship ads, then the usefulness of dmesg would be diminished considerably, as I would be forced to wade through all the crap just to find the debugging info.

--

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[mattc]

After all, it's free software, so what's the harm in popping up a nag screen when the user starts his mail client to remind him of important free software projects?

'screen' does this. It's really annoying.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[athmanb]

Something tells me that you aren't talking about the same word 'free' as I...

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[Phil Wilkins]

This is a self regulating problem. If the advertising gets too annoying, then you patch the source. If the authors for whatever reason try to entwine the advertising, making it hard to remove, you get a better coder to unentwine it, and distribute the patch. So if it's really annoying, it just gets removed, whereas if it's at just the right level to get noticed, but not irritate a talented coder, it lives.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[GOiNK]

"Personally, I really dislike having to look at a credits-list or a splash-screen or other such things every time I load a piece of software, which is why I don't inflict such things upon my own users."
Well, you don't HAVE to keep it there, but I think it would be a nice gesture to recognize that someone is actually helping this along. Without support many developers might be tempted to leave it at some "version 0.999b434" but never get to version 1.0 because they have other stuff to do. Don't let your "everything has to be free and open"-thoughts get in the way of recognizing those that help us.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[Zach978]

..I think it would be a nice gesture to recognize that someone is actually helping..

Yes, I actually patch the source to have the credits stay on longer, then I just read all the names, everytime, over and over again, recognizing them....I'm I'm sure that those authors really appreciate it..

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[darkrot]

pico ~/.screenrc

startup_message off

^X Y

no longer.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[Ka-YE]

Look, I'm sorry but my sentimentality is as follows: If you or anyone for that matter doesn't want to be 'inconvenienced' by these messages, pursue writing your own free, fully-featured, open source modules and readily exclude any type of kudos to your sponsors. Then you can distribute it among your fellow freedom fighters who dislike being 'forced' to do things. That way, you can conform to all your own personal standards of what should be done and all your future wading will be through useful non crap only. After all, you *did* contribute much time and expense to your offering, the least you could do is keep it convenient for the seemingly ungrateful critics. Ka-YE say IMHO intended, my apologies for not pre-appending.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[ssb201]

It cannot be free if there is a price to pay. Any price. I know it is being nit picky, but the world is in the details.

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[nutsy]

And while we seem to all be in kvetch mode, the new versions of dosemu eject a long EULA when you run them ... gahhhh ...

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[AME]

I'm hardly a `freedom fighter'. As far as I'm concerned, they could write whatever they like into their software. I don't even really mind if it's closed source (although it wouldn't be my first preference) as long as it works and I'm reasonably certain that nothing fishy is going on.

I'm all for credit where credit is due, as long as it's in the appropriate place, but I have second thoughts about my syslogs being the appropriate place. On principle, I think log files should have a very high signal to noise ratio.

The bottom line is that I question the wisdom of beginning down this road. It begins with silly things like this, but it's all just a matter of degree. Soon companies start contributing to projects with the expectation of ad space in the boot sequence. (Or worse, contributing on the condition of such representation.) Some would choose which projects to contribute to based on whether they will get space.

It doesn't take much before the log file is useless. Take a look at USENET for an example of what happens when people stop using a medium for it's intended purpose. Try to find some useful information or discussion among the spams in some newsgroups.

I could just comment out the offending block of source, but if this became commonplace then I would get pretty sick of having to touch the source of every driver on my system every time I upgrade a kernel. Thank you, but I have better things to do with my time, which is why I use a distro instead of compiling my entire system from source.

--

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[RaZ0r]

who needs documentation? :)


- Stop praying for someone to save you, and save yourself.-
KMFDM

Re:rm -f CREDITS

[RaZ0r]

Yea, i'm so right:)


- Stop praying for someone to save you, and save yourself.-
KMFDM

"Advertising Clause"

[tsprad]

We were all so pleased when the University of California agreed to drop the "advertising clause" from their license... Yet another reason to prefer BSD? ;-)

Prime marketing space...

[Canis Lupus]

Yelp, this is pretty prime advertising space. I might see it once every two months or so. (Last reboot was a processor upgrade; time before that was another stick of memory; time before that was a scheduled power outage to upgrade the building's power; time before that was moving to a new building;)

The real conspiracy happens when these evil corporations realize that the linux kernel does not need rebooting and start introducing instability into the kernel itself to accomplish their own evil ends. They are already planning to pay-off Linus and Alan. They'll stop at nothing. Whose kernel is next? Maybe even yours....

They're not the only ones!

[pjrc]

As long as we're making a big deal out of nothing...

CPU: Intel Celeron (Mendocino) stepping 00

Intel gets special consideration

POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX

Here's a plug for unifix, and maybe even IEEE

mtrr: v1.35a (19990819) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)

Shameless self promotion on Richard's part

Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039

Swansea, what right have they...

<Sound Blaster 16 (4.16)> at 0x220 irq 5 dma 1,5

Creative Labs gets their registered trademark displayed

(scsi0) <Adaptec AIC-7890/1 Ultra2 SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 6/0 Vendor: SEAGATE Model: ST39102LW Rev: 0005 Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: CD-ROM XM-6201TA Rev: 1030

Hey, three more nasty for-profit entities... how dare they

3c59x.c:v0.99H 11/17/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.h tml

And who hasn't seen Donald, who wrote drivers for nearly every card in existance at the time

Most authors of free software / open source authors display their names. If a company pays a few people to contriubute full time to a project, why shouldn't they get the same (rather minimal) mention that individuals get?

Um...Rebooting?

[cmat]

Um, guys, this is *linux* remember? How many times a YEAR do you reboot your machine? Right, I thought so. And how many times do you actually watch the bootup-sequence? Right.

So give the developers a break, did they write good drivers? Yes? Then let them have they're 5 seconds of fame, they deserve it *more than us commenting, that's for sure* ;)

Chris

OT - yes you can....

[lemox]

I'm assuming you're talking about the logos and such. Here's one for ASUS boards that works on 1 or 2 Giga-Byte boards. If you do some looking, I'm sure you'll find countless others...

/* comments are your friend! */

[dlc]

if this bothers you, there is this construct in C called a comment...

/* Hide what you don't want to see. */

darren

Cthulhu for President!

Re: who reboots???

[CaseStudy]

Those of use who use laptops.

Hrrm.... I'm thirsty...

[Ozzy]

Always Coca-Cola
:)

Reminiscent of NPR...

[sterno]

It's kind of like the advertising you here on NPR or PBS. As opposed to full blown ads, they just say, "this program brought to you by...".

Just hope to god your filesystem doesn't try to launch a pledge drive!

---

Re:slippery slope idiocy

[jmccay]

It is only recently that Linux has slipped out of Geekdom into more of a spotlight. The speed at which it will happen will not be a constant pace. It will probably increase compareably to the commercialization and popularity of Linux in the main stream.

Your point of other drivers doing this for 4+ years is pointless. Over most of those 4+ years, Linux was primarily known throughout Geekdom. It wasn't getting as much press back then compared to the mainstream press it recieves now. Because its popularity was primarily reserved to geeks back then, there was no commercial interest to advertise there. There was no market, so commercially focused companies would not advertise in huge numbers. The primary users preferred opensource and/or free stuff over the commercial stuff. Thus, you could safely assume that commercial companies such as MS wouldn't advertise in this market--it just wouldn't pay.

It may not be that safe to assume the same in the future. As Linux becomes more popular, the user base may start to change to users who don't care if they use commercial products. When this happens, you may or may not see more commercial advertising in this way. It depends what on the reactions to any initial "test" advertisements done.

Although, how many people really read what those say anyways? Mine can scroll by too quickly sometimes. Either way, advertising ussually goes hand-in-hand with commercialization.

Same with NPR, here's why:

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

NPR is getting the same way. About 6-9 months ago I heard a story on NPR about this very problem. The reason they had to do this was that the gov't cut spending for public broadcasting drastically (like, 50%, although I don't remember the actual numbers). What's really dumb is that it was only a few million dollars--less than the DoD spends on facial tissue.

However, there are two mitigating factors:

1) Ads on public broadcasting (TV or radio) still can't promote a product, just an entity (like the company, corporation, foundation, etc). So you might see ads like "WalMart--Promoting Consumerism Through Shoddy Products" but you won't see "WalMart--We've Put TeleTubby Action Figures On Sale". They have other guidelines about content, format, etc. That's why you got the "soft sell" impression.

2) The fact that I heard a story on NPR critical of NPR and its advertisers says that the public broadcasting system, whatever its faults, works way better than the private sector.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

Re:rebooting machines

[dwakeman]

laptops users do.

Ads in Makefile

[GoRK]

Anyone compiled eggdrop recently?

There's always "ads" for candy companies that show up during the compile.

E.G. "This will take a while.. go get some Runts"

~GoRK

Re:Ads in Makefile

[alarosa]

My favorite line in the Eggdrop ./configure script

Checking OS...Ack! You are CURSED with IRIX!

Where are the screams of outrage?

[mr]

RMS is morally opposed to advertising...that is why he railed against the BSD "advertising clause".

Where are the outraged voices now that some code associated with the Linux kernel-space has "advertising"?

This isnt the first boot sequence ad

[Cid Highwind]

from my own boot-up messages

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
They've gotten a plug in every kernel since before 2.0.0

ne.c:v1.10 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
NE*000 ethercard probe at 0x240: 00 c0 f0 35 68 9b
Anyone who uses an ne-x000 ethernet card sees this one.

look at dvd's

[cowscows]

It's easy enough to ignore here, but where this sorta thing has happened and gotten really annoying is in dvd's. I got a nice new powerbook with dvd, and naturally had to spend even more money on some movies. My collectors edition of The Sixth Sense contains like 8 previews between the FBI warning and the actual movie that I can't seem to skip over. Even when fast forwarding through it at 8x I still haveta wait a few minutes, and be subjected to that Mission to Mars travesty yet again. When these ads start changing to stuff not even a little movie related, then I'm gonna get really upset.

Re:look at dvd's

[WNight]

Five previews, as I counted.

The Sixth Sense and The Mummy both do that.

That's the main reason I want open source DVD players, so I can get one without that lame feature. Either that, or a crack for one of the existing soft players.

You're lucky you can speed through, *all* the buttons other than stop are ignored on mine.

And you're right, movies are now showing third party advertising, what's to stop them from shoving it onto a DVD? And then forcing people to watch it.

I'll just install a DVD player that automatically skips any section of the disk that has the "can't fast forward" flag set. And never go back to using this lame standalone player again.

The boot screen of NT is advertising...

[Refrag]

For Microsoft!

What's the problem?

[borzwazie]

Here we are complaining about sponsorship? What kind of article is this? Haven't we in the Linux community been fighting for commercial interests to support Open Source? Don't you think it's right that they get credit?

Take a look at most of the 3com ethernet drivers when they load. The guy (sorry, I can't remember his name, he works at Nasa) has his name show up when the driver loads. After all the work he did, he deserves it.

So now we have some commercial interests give us something for free, and we whine about the terms? Over a few lines of text that say "Hey, look, we did this!"

I believe that under the GPL you must credit your sources. What better credit than this? Props to everyone involved in this project, a few lines of text to credit them are the very least that they deserve.

Slashdot needs a method by which people can rate articles.

You actualy read that.

[geekguy]

Whenever I boot my computer I turn it on and leave the room to get a snack untill it finishes loading. Unless the ads make my computer start making noises to get my atention I would never notice them

.

Re:You actualy read that.

[Oarboat_7]

Just wait.

Soon the people/entities who write Sound driver code will figure it out:

On loading of the driver on boot-up, the merry melodies of:

"Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should."

I don't think they have gotten around to banning musical jingles for cigarettes in Linux boot sequences (yet).

Re:Whoop-ti-freakin-do

[Oarboat_7]

Perhaps Donald Becker should take his reward for the work he's done (a considerable amount, mind you) by selling his name to some concern. He's certainly got the name recognition, so it's gotta be worth quite a bit these days to some vendor.

Re:no problemo

[Refrag]

But those people developed the code, and it only took up one line (probably a line used for other information anyway). MP3.com didn't develop any of the code, they "sponsored" it. And there are way too many sponsors flying by which reduces the signal/noise ratio. Sponsorship notices should go in an "about" window, not fly by during boot.

If I made the rules. . .

[JohnZed]

I'd let each module provide one line of valid sponsorship information. No pure "ads" (you couldn't, say, advertise for a product or make an offer to sell something), but mention of sponsoring companies/individuals seems completely fair. If we keep it down to one or two lines, it won't get out of hand (how often do you load/unload modules anyways?).

Public television and radio, for instance, both pride themselves on being ad-free. But you always hear the names of their sponsors mentioned in a reasonably dignified tagline. As long as we don't end up with periods where our software stops working for an hour to encourage us to phone in our pledges. . .

Actually, that may be a valid analogy. Does free software have something to learn from public television? Since federal support for PBS has dwindled in recent years, the organization has come to rely more on corporate donations (which they always had) and merchandising (remember, these folks invented Sesame Street). I think this is different from, but possibly compatible with, the common open source model in which a company hires developers to work on a piece of free software as full time employees (such as Red Hat does with many projects or IBM does with Apache). Besides ReiserFS, I know that the Linux Scalability project has a real sponsorship model, but I'm wondering if anybody else does.
--JRZ

Re:If I made the rules. . .

[Raylen]

If Free Software goes the way of Sesame Street:

"Parents bite and shove over the short supply of TickleMeTux dolls this Christmas. Last years fad, ChiaGNU, seems to have faded out ..."

Maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

New Reiserfs messages

[lar3ry]

May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Checking ReiserFS transaction log (device 16:02)
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: COKE - It's the Real Thing! (tm)
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: MAKE MONEY FAST! Surf on over to http://ima.realdumbschmuck.com for details!
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Dow Chemical -- Without chemicals, life itself would be uninteresting. http://www.dow.com
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Pepsi -- The choice of the GNU generation. Ignore that COKE message a few lines back.
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Hiya, Sailor! Looking for a good time? Try: http://real-teens-nude-and-lewd.com
May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Is it painful sitting around looking at console messages? Try Preporation H -- Best for hemmorhoid sufferers.
May 03 00:59:35 testsys kernel: Resierfs -- internal buffer overflow. Deleting code but retaining advertisements.
May 03 00:59:35 testsys kernel: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? http://www.abc.com
May 03 00:59:35 testsys kernel: Who Wants To Be A Billionaire? http://www.oracle.com/~ellison
May 03 00:59:35 testsys kernel: Allocating 200 Mb virtual space for more adverts; loading special VGA driver
May 03 00:59:36 testsys kernel: Jolt -- The REAL Choice of a GNU Generation. Ignore that Pepsi ad (and the COKE one while you are at it).

--

And then the next logical step...

[Squirrel Killer]

...is for MS to require a bug in the software which will cause random kernal crashes and system lockups to force a reboot, and thus see the ad again!

Serious though, either comment it out if you want a clean bootlog or put up with it if you never look at it or just don't care. They can't force us into processor wasting ads as long as it's open.

unix designed NOT to print spurious messages?

[Wakko Warner]

Ever run BIND?

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Re:It bothers you? Why are you a speed reader?

[nospoon]

I think this is funny because I installed SuSE 6.4 several weeks ago with the reiserfs and never even noticed the lines for the sponsors because my computer boots up to fast to read it.

Advertising clause

[mr]

Perhaps this /. user believes all modules should be quiet.

Or finds the whole 'advertizing clause' argument to not be worth anyones time....

Or how about "advertising BAD, GPL GOOD" then seeing "advertising" in "GPL-ed" code.

And such discussion is only flamebait if YOU are unwilling to talk about/defend such a position. As an AC, I guess you are unwilling to discuss it,

Re:It's open source; so what?

[MrJay]

I can't believe the general consensus is positive on this. Since when does free software require that the author is given credit in a syslog?

I'm sorry, but I don't like this. I don't hack GNOME applications so that I can be famous. I do it because it's a challenge; nothing more. I obviously don't do it for the money either. That's why I work with M$ during the day.

The beauty of open source lies in the fact that ALL CONTRIBUTORS GET CREDIT!

This is not what open source is for. Yet another misinterpretaion of open source and free software. Open source exists to give developers certain rights; the right to use other code, and at the same time ensuring that the original author's code is not used to make money unknowingly to them.

I'm going to puke if someone else makes another blanket generalization about open source and how it's changing the way I do my laundry, etc. If you want credit for your work, make a damn web page.

Re:Whoop-ti-freakin-do

[spudnic]

This just shows how effective those little blurbs in the boot sequence are! They made Donald Becker a household name. Well, maybe not, but you get the point.

This is awful

[Patrick Lewis]

Next thing you know, Slashdot will be putting banner ads on web pages.

Welcome to the real world

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently there is still a large contingent of Slashtwat readers who think Open Source[tm] software is made by magic elves who live in trees. Unfortunately for you Keebler lovers, this is not the case. Development costs money. Hiring people to write software costs money. Keeping them at your company costs more money. Giving the result away for free costs even more money. Perhaps some of these readers will come to realize this fact when they either (a) graduate or (b) move out of mommy's house, and have to collect money in some way, shape or form so that they can continue to eat and have a roof over their heads. Idealism and altruism only go so far. At some point, you have to pay the bills. One way to do this is to find people, corporations, whatever who are willing to sponsor the development of the software. This is, however, a two-way street. The sponsoring party will expect something in return for their investment. What they will expect goes up with the amount of money they contribute. For some amount of money, they will be content to get the feature they wanted. For some larger amount of money, they will want an acknowledgement of their contribution. Presumably for some even larger amount of money, they would want a full-blown advertisement complete with full motion video, Belgian techno soundtrack and voiceover by Gilbert Gottfried. The Reiserfs group did not apparently go so far as to request that amount of money. But they could have. Anyway, if this simple acknowledgement of those parties who paid the bills really bothers you that much, simply hack the source, or even better, send Reiserfs a nice big donation with a request that they remove the acknowledgements themselves. Of course, that's a significant donation we're talking about there. One you can't come up with if you still live at home with your parents. Guess you're stuck with either ignoring the messages, or showing some respect for the people who financed this software that you get to use for free. Tough choice, I know. HTH. HAND.

Isn't this pointless?

[Ejort]

I've seen better places to advertise.
Like most Linux users I never see my boot sequence.
Only the kernel developers are going to see these adverts.

that's not really an ad as much as it is credit

[josepha48]

Trust me. From someone who now works on putting banner ads on web sites that is not an ad. An ad would be if it said buy suse. The interesting thing about this will be when Redhat and other vendors get a hold of this code. Will they take these comments out in there custom kernels so that Redhat users don't see the suse credit?

I think that it is abnoxious, but then again that is SuSE. SuSE did not open source there YaST tool. Yes you have the source for it but it is not GPL, and you cannot use ot to create your own distribution. That is SuSE. RedHat open sources all its tools (AFAIK) which is why I went with Redhat. They also push for GPL stuff, remeber Redhat and debian would not distribute kde till troll tech opened up its qt tool kit. But enought of that that is just why I like Redhat.

The truth here is that the reiser fs is not really open source it is one of those open sourceish licenses that if you keep up with kernel traffic then you'd know that it caused a lot of stir up there too. Oh well I'll wait for 2.4 and see what is in it. I'd be more incliened to use ext2 or sgi journaling fs anyway.

send flames > /dev/null

It doesn't bother me

[Kris Magnusson]

"quite frankly, if someone made a driver and put '© 2000 Driversoft' in it, is that so bad?"

I am a board member of Driversoft. I'll have to talk with the senior VP of engineering there about taking you up on this.... =)

Kris Magnusson
Director, Developer Relations
Invisible Worlds

Member of the Board of Directors,
Driversoft

Look on the Bright Side...

[cqnn]

You'll never have to worry about your
computer stopping for Pledge Breaks.

Commentator:
We'll return you to your regular process for a moment,
we just wanted to thank you for using our module, and
to remind you that this quality programming cannot
continue without the support of users like you...

Now, while we're waiting for you to upload that pledge,
here is the 83rd rebroadcast of "Lord of the Dance"

That's not too bad...

[Kymermosst]

I don't mind sponsored by messages... or things like that... what I would not like to see is this:

Visit http://xxxpics.com/p0rn?adclick=8q3w48w

or anything else telling me to visit a site. So, in my book, sponsored by ads are fine... but visit ads or annoying ads would really piss me off.

I would prefer that sponsorship ads and copyrights and similar not make it into my syslog, though...

Just Remember This:

[cr@ckwhore]

"Sponsored By" is the tricky language that PBS uses to hide it's advertisements... can free software be compared to PBS? You 'betcha!

Cr@ckwhore

You ever try Caldera

[Mr.roboto]

Caldera is literally plastered with advertisments, my old S.u.S.E ver is much better (2.0.29 kernals if that says much) I've heard very good things about Slack and am going to give that a try, but I'll have to get a CD cuz I don't have the bandwith to do it in under a few hours. If you're that concerned about advertisments, ditch your Desktop enviroment or D/L another one. Remember, Prompt owns!

Heh, Microsoft sponsors ads in Linux too!

[torpor]

"This stack dump brought to you by Microsoft Corporation. Where do you want to go now?"

Heh heh... I can totally see that happening.

There already is a place for credits and thanks

[Lathi-]

The boot up messages are for debugging and status information. OK, fine; add a copyright line too (although I don't really like that). The main problem I have with littering the bootup messages is the limited buffer for dmesg. For those of you who say to increase it, there are kernel considerations not to. Also, not everyone has week long uptimes. Some of us have to dual-boot to share with others. The correct place for credits, sponsors, special thanks and copyrights is in the man pages. OK, fine, you don't like man pages. Put it in the README file or whatever you use for documentation. It's not like I don't "support sponsors". I am all for giving credit where credit is due and also giving thanks to whom you are thankful. As a developer, I really like the idea of someone giving me money to write free software. The point is, everything has its place. I know others have also put spurious information in the boot up messages. I don't necessarily think we are picking on reiserfs here. I personally belive they should all move the copyrights to the man pages.

PLEEZE moderate this up

[mrdisco99]

The fact that these drivers are open source makes this a non-issue.

If you don't like it, just get rid of it. I don't see what the big fuss is about.

+++

Re:PLEEZE moderate this up

[rwade]

good point, a little redundent though. did you read the rest of the RE:s, or even the top level strings?

Not to mention...

[Sinner]

POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX

That's been there for years. All the people getting excited over this should probably pay more attention to their own boot sequence before worrying about other people's.

Business model. (important! moderate this up)

[Palisade]

They aren't advertisements. Namesys's business model is to provide changes to their open source product for companies that pay them to add it.

SuSe, mp3.com, ecila.com all paid to have Namesys add some modifications to ReiserFS. In fact, when it scrolls their names it also mentions what feature they paid for.

You won't see nudebabes.com in there unless they pay for a useful feature to be added to ReiserFS. You won't ever see a slogan in there either.

We're already there (log attached)

[Medievalist]

[snip,snip]
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035.
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: Swansea University Computer Society TCP/IP for NET3.034
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: IP Protocols: IGMP, ICMP, UDP, TCP
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: Swansea University Computer Society IPX 0.34 for NET3.035
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: IPX Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: Charlie's kernel hacks installed (don't tell mom!)
Feb 29 04:04:33 GASBAG kernel: VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_5.6.0 initialized
[snip,snip]

Oh, the humanity...
--Charlie

The fear is real, yes I said fear.

[Effendi13]

I read negaPLuCK's fear and know exactly what he is talking about. You remember a long time ago when VCRs came out and VHS tapes started containing previews a few months later. Nowdays we are being shocked out of our seats with Intel and Mentos commercials on rented videos.

It gets worse. Have you ever seen the end of a car race when the winning driver gets out of his car? He gets to wear like 3 baseball caps and drinks from a sports drink bottle, label to the camera, his car gets littered from end to end with sponsership signs and such. There is more activity and noise and prompted sponser plugs than actual words from the driver.

Professional snow skiing. Ever see the athletes at the end take his skis off, turn to the camera and show off the bottom of the skis?

Ever accidentally give away an e-mail adress and then have to abandon it due to recieving more spam than you can unsubscribe to?

This is definately something to consider as Open Source software is obviously underfunded for the most part. A discrete text blurb like this one is definately not bad, but as I said before, it gets worse.

-Effendi

Re:It's open source; so what?

[Malor]

I figure this is fair. If you have the technical savvy to modify the source to remove these messages (and believe me, it doesn't take very much), then you don't get advertising.

If you don't have the tech savvy, chances are you spend $$$ on your system to make it work, and an understated plea for more $$ is probably pretty reasonable.

One of the main benefits of open source is that you can make your system work any damn way you want, if you're willing to spend the time.

I'm pretty tech-savvy, and I often have no clue what's running on my Windows box; there's so many buried processes and components that God only knows what the system is actually DOING while I'm sitting here typing. Many popular programs have been found to have hidden 'features' that transmit user data back to the mothership. You can stop this with a firewall, of course, but how many Average Joes are going to know how to run one?

I'm not arguing that this is ethically correct (it most emphatically IS NOT, IMO), but considering that most people are being snooped on bigtime by many of the programs they have trustingly installed, a couple of lines of text as credit seem pretty damn innocuous. And if you have any shred of a clue, you can get rid of even that much.

If you want to use an Open Source product, you are taking on the responsibility of making things work *yourself* instead of trading money for someone else to do it for you. Whining about cosmetic behaviors of a program when you have the source code right in front of you is pretty dumb, IMO. Make it work how *you* want it to. That is probably the single largest reason why you would choose an open source product over a commercial one.

Now I'll have to recompile my kernel

[Error 404]

to include a little sponsorship note in the "core dumped" message.

A little thank you to the good folks at MS, whose FrontPage98 installation routines introduced me to Linux by destroying my formerly adequate Windows98 system.

Maybe "core dumped. If this were Windows, you'd be seeing blue now. %0x %0x blablabla"

Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad

How about...

[zeck]

May 03 00:59:34 testsys kernel: Network support sponsored by Pepsi - choice of the GNU generation.
To activate network support, enter proof of purchase number from 6 pack or 2 liter bottle:______________

My answer...

[kwsNI]

OK, I realize that you are nothing but a poor, 16 year-old with an IQ below 85 and without any friends so you spend your pathetic time trolling on Slashdot. Yet still, I will try to answer your question.

Oops, never mind, I've hit my 50 word limit already.

kwsNI

Re:My answer...

[Dwonis]

Why would you feed the troll? (No, I don't agree with your views, but I still wouldn't feed the trolls).
--------
"I already have all the latest software."

Re:My answer...

[kwsNI]

Think of it kind of like when you were a kid and used to feed the ducks and you'd toss food to them. Really, deep down inside, you were just trying to bean them in the head with the food...

kwsNI

I don't see what's wrong with this...

[dburr]

When I write a piece of software, I am allowed to put a message in there. ("foo.o: Written by Joe Shmoe"). Nobody raises their eyebrow at that. So why is everybody up in arms when corporations start doing it too? I don't really understand why this is considered "wrong" or "bad." After all, they have made the effort to get this code written, by providing resources (net connections, computers, whatever) and/or money to the programmers. They deserve a little plug. And it's not even really a plug. They're not exactly saying "HI! I'm Foo Corp.! You'll LOVE our !NEW! Fubar-O-Matic 2000! Buy yours today!!" It's just saying "Hey! We helped write this."

Also, it's not like this is a new concept either. Take a look at your dmesg sometime. Ever notice that the IPX portions of NET4 were contributed by Caldera? Or that Swensea University (sp?) sponsored the entire NET4 codebase. (OK, so they aren't a corporation, but they still qualify as a large entity...) Samba is now being heavily sponsored by SGI, and Corel is now a major contributor to Wine. So what? The companies are happy - they get to show that they are really cool and committed to Open Source. And the users are happy - they get a MUCH better product. It's a win-win scenario.

Some of the biggest Open Source sponsors are corporations and businesses now. Let's not forget that.

--

That's not an advertisement

[Andrew Cady]

It's credit. It gives credit to three companies that helped the project. It's no different than seeing "3c59x.c:v0.99H 11/17/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.h tml" whenever I use my NIC.

ok here are the comercials...

[kuiken]

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
---
LVM version 0.8i by Heinz Mauelshagen (02/10/1999)
---
rtl8139.c:v1.08 6/25/99 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/
rtl8139.c:v1.08 6/25/99 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/
---
trr: v1.35a (19990819) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
---
Did anyone ever complained about that? Donald Becker/nasa have 2 lines in one driver
If sameone wants to spend time and/or money on open source, let them at least get the credit
they helped get as a jounaling file system, with makes linux far more intresting for mision critical use than before ... so let the ppl hvr there momment in the spot light.
And if you _realy_ cant stand it (as said before) its open source take it out or dont use it

"Banner ads" at the gas pump

[tardaeron]

I have long thought, and some local hess stations apparently agree with me on this, that gas pumps should have some form of relaying advertisements to idividuals pumping gas into their cars. Think about it.. all the free email sites and the free ISPs out there are driven by revenue from advertisements, and there is even software that allows you to constantly watch banner ads and make PROFIT from it.. Long distance phone calls can be had free at the price of listening to advertisements on the telephone. Why couldn't someone integrate direct advertisement to the gas-purchasing public and offer their gas cheaper for it? I would be willing to listen to advertisements about local zoos, restaurants, and even godawful car dealer commercials to save ten or fifteen cents a gallon.

if that's what it takes...

[Dwonis]

If a company wants to sponsor something, they will anyway. The only time a company will demand blatant advertising is when you already let someone else have it first.

Yes, the company should get credit (in the CREDITS file), but at bootup? Putting the company's name in the boot sequence is no different than spamming my e-mail account. You're putting information where it's not wanted. If I want to know who is responsible for something (which I often do), I'll look at the CREDITS or README file.

One should also note that people start to hate companies that force them to see stuff they don't want to, so it's not great from a marketing perspective, either.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."

Re:if that's what it takes...

[Dwonis]

If there were commercials every 5 minutes, instead of every 10, people would get *very* angry, would they not?
--------
"I already have all the latest software."

These ads have got to go.

[AxelBoldt]

It is ridiculous that some second-rate corporations get to advertise in my boot logs while the names of Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox et.al. never show even show up there. Is it more important to donate some money than a significant amount of time of your life? No it is not.

And don't give me the crap about "sponsor messages are not advertising". Of course they are. The advertisers want to own your mind in any way they can.

I'm sure that this little bug will be fixed as soon as reiserfs is accepted into the official kernel sources.

--

Re:kinda cool

[ZorbaTHut]

Now there's an idea! AllAdvantage sells screen space while you're using the computer, right? How about a company that offers a BIOS update to advertise at you while you boot up? Or you could replace your Windows startup screens, or maybe hack the BSOD or the GPF message. Or, even better - Linux login advertising!

Welcome to Phoenix
Kernel 2.2.5-15 on an i686
Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst. Sprite.
login:

And you get paid every time someone logs into your Linux box . . .
No? Well, if you don't like that, how about . . .

segmentation fault, core dumped. All day, all week, burgers at McDonald's are only 99 cents.

The scary thing is, you just KNOW there's some ad guy out there thinking this exact same thing.

Re:Whoop-ti-freakin-do

[winter@jurai.net]

I'm sure glad I'm a BSD developer and don't feel the need to feed my fucking ego all the time. Check out the boot messages that FreeBSD emits; you'll note that there are -no- email addresses mentioned and that most drivers only print 2 or 3 lines.

I spend loads of time on FreeBSD and I could care less if some random luser knows my email address and that I worked on a driver that they use daily. Most of the BSD coders seem to feel this way.

I think it must have something to do with maturity or something.

Reiserfs Mailing List Thread

[Laven]

This issue came up and was a cause of a small flame war on the reiserfs mailing list a few weeks ago. Some guy got really angry about this and began a "CREDITS removing patch site" to apply to your reiserfs sources upon each upgrade to easily remove it from the boot sequence.

Eventually I believe Hans Reiser decided to reduce the sponsors into one line, but the sponsors must be mentioned because they need the credit. Without the sponsors, the software would not have been possible.

People also agreed (as they do here) that if you do not want to see credits in your boot sequence, you can always remove it yourself. After all, it is open source.

No news is good news.

[SurfsUp]

...which is another reason it is not in the 2.3 version

I thought about it some more, and I realized that the principal that must apply, classically, "no news is good news". You are right to remove these messages. They shouldn't appear during package installation either. And there should be no code in the kernel module devoted to providing an option. That just takes up memory.

All the same, reading the credits gives me a warm and fuzzy. I just don't want it mixed in any way with the machinery of the OS. One excellent place to give credit/blow one's own horn in the package info of an RPM, as long as it's not too obtrusive and doesn't get in the way of the functional information. Another good place is in the usual CREDITS file that's often included in a package distribution. Do we need any more advertising that this? I really don't think so. As you said (more or less) being able to take credit on *one* web site that you own is worth many 1,000,000's of little boot nags.
--

Re:No news is good news.

[Artichoke]

One excellent place to give credit/blow one's own horn in the package info of an RPM,

Unless your not using RH.

Okay, so moral equivalents...

Blah blah - just making the point.

Re:No news is good news.

[CloudWarrior]

And there should be no code in the kernel module devoted to providing an option. That just takes up memory.

No it doesn't. This would only need a couple of #ifdef macros. They'd take up hard disk space, maybe, a couple of extra milliseconds compile time, certainly, but not memory.

Secondly, although I agree with the 'no news is good news' principle, you need some good news to make sure that the bad news can get through. [I'd be pretty worried if my computer displayed a blank screen for the minutes that it boots]. And once you have that, why not have a bit of advertisment - providing its not too verbose, there isn't a problem - we have it all the time at the moment with network drivers copyright this university, etc.

CloudWarrior .o. "I may be in the gutter but I look to the stars"

Capitalism == good as time approaches infinity...

[PhilosopherKing]

Just a quick rant...

Capitilism is only 'good' as time approaches infinity.

Democracy is 50 million little YESes and NOes a day, not once every four years.

This should really be nipped in the bud right now, and it has, according to the person who originally coded the messages.

We know latin today, and thus eqyptian and many other languages and knowledge, thanks to religious zeal.

/rant

You say NO, no thank you.

[PhilosopherKing]

There really is no reason for this fungus called sponsorship. For about 2,000 to 3,000 years it was considered good to donate to the arts and not reshape them around the sponsor. Yes, arts would reflect who paid for them (family crest, intials, mottos and other symbols worked into the piece of art) but it wasn't driven by the 'for profit' mentallity. Personally, it is not 'free' in either the beer or the speech sense if it displays a sponsorship message. I really think as time goes on, we should have more 'free' philanthrope, not more sponsorship.

BIOS ads: "If you hate this ad, install Linux

[xixax]

Someone should buy BIOS space so that each time you reboot when installing software under Windows, the BIOS flashes up "seeing this advert too often? Time to upgrade your OS!".

X.

Arrghhhh! More advertising

[luicste]

Okay, since when were portions of kernels allowed to be "sponsored" by individual companies? There's already too much advertising in the media, why should the boot-up sequences become advertisements too?