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Credit and Free Software
Hans Reiser - you're thinking ReiserFS, and you'd be right - has a proposal to slather Free Software with credits for its authors. Good? Bad? This is something the community has generally moved away from, but maybe Reiser has a good point. Newsforge is part of OSDN.
I strongly agree with Reiser on this issue. Although he doesn't
necessarily argue for "slathering" software with attributions, rather
he argues convincingly IMO that the credit for a piece of software
should remain visible to the public users. This can be tastefully
done easily, the point is that leaving the credit for writing the
software in the source code is pointless as most people don't ever
read the source code.
It isn't even so much that someone can't supply a new spalsh screen,
it just needs to include attributions to the original authors. I
think he makes some very interesting and very valid points. It is
interesting to note as he states, that although Stallman is a huge
contributor to many projects, he rarely gets credited on anything.
I feel the same way as Reiser on this, even though Stallman doesn't
want to burden the software with licensing restrictions, it bothers
me that he gets so little in the way of credit for what he has helped
to bring about.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Then the new GPL Secured Platinum Card from RMS is for you! All the credit you ever wanted, in one small piece of code.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, mind. I just want to remind some of the zealots that writing Free software is often not the selfless idealistic cause some make it out to be.
Immersing it in vinegar is not helping, either.
If I am impressed with a piece of software enough, I will look. Don't bother me with splash screens or anything else of the sort.
OSS belongs to the community. There's really no need for credits. Where would we draw the line if we allowed credits? banner ads? annoying pleas for money? pop up windows?
This guy definitely want credit :-)
The way I see it, the authors deserve to have credits all over the free software that they made. And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.
If yes, how did the people behind the project earn enough money off the idea to at least pay their living expenses and some more to compensate for the risc. they took that failure of the project would lead with them to have lived without income for a while?
I ask because I am at present engaged in producing a piece of software that is not a copy of an existing product, and cannot think of a way to make a living out of it if I release it as open source.
As a provider of free content on the internet myself -- not usually computer programs, though -- I agree with you that programmers, and anyone who provides any free content, deserve recognition. Free materials on the internet are usually high quality. They're free because it's the author's passion to create it, be it a computer program, or a series of unproduced television scripts. Anyone who makes free content, does it out of passion. That passion makes quality products, and encouraging publicity of the author's names will encourage productivity from that author.
First, I think that mostly FOSS developers and engineers can appreciate the work that goes into this stuff. So I sortof agree that additional credit might be good as a way of thanking those who have made contributions. Software, especially application software, tends to be like a collage. Do you credit everyone equally? Do some people get more credit? What happens if we forget to thank/credit certain people along the way? I think this could be a disaster and potential hurt the movement.
I would like to propose that, in addition to the mandatory screensaver displaying the credits, that every fifth time you run a utility its name, version number, date of creation, and author are read through the speaker. This way, people can truly appreciate the donation of software by others. To celebrate Free Software's global approach towards solving problems, this should be subtitled on the screen in the user's native language. This way, we can truly feel the joy of helping people without compensation while being compensated for it.
However if the developer would like credit then they could release the software under a modified license that would require the display of their bios. Already a lot of the open source projects have some information on different contributors on the project's website. I would think maybe creating something like this in the Help-->About, or man pages type area may be a good compromise.
As for the BSD license change, I think that's like comparing apples to oranges, because it seems like they did that more for the university and not for any actual developers.
Need to create a mySQL Table?
It's no wonder this came from a guy who named a file system after himself. I wonder if he'd namecd his apartm^H^H^H^H^H^H estate after himself.
IMO, the people who are going to care are already seeing the names, either in the source or at the project websites or in CVS. To everyone else, any sort of more obtrusive crediting is just going to be obnoxious, and they're still not going to know any more names then they did before.
The whole point, if anyone still remembers the original goal of the majority of OSS projects, is to write some kick-ass code that's going to be done the Right Way, rather than the short-cutty kludgy way that most programmers are forced to code at work. To me, this includes making the software as elegant and streamlined as possible, and the various methods of ego gratification I can think of (extra splash screens, etc) seem incompatible with this.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Like someone else mentioned above, this is not free software. If you write software that throws a bunch of credits in people's face all the time (the screensaver idea is an awful one), distros will be inclined not to use your software by default if the license forces the issue. Imagine if business contributes to a free software project and then insists that the business be "given credit" by putting their name all over the place. But then I see ReiserFS doing just that: last time I formatted a ReiserFS partition, I got a list of all the companies that contributed money to the project. Don't get me wrong, ReiserFS is great, but I don't care to see a bunch of ads in my software. Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.
Free software is not about egos, it is about keeping software free. Forcing something like this through licensing makes the software non-free. Want the credits? Look at the source code or the documentation!!!
--sdem
From the article:
Have you ever worked a day job to fund other coders? Pure hell, let me tell you, especially if you are also so essential that time off becomes unacceptable.
Have you ever worked in a place where your work was carrying/funding dead weight on a project team? Will all due respect to Mr. Reiser, this is no different, and will probably always be an issue until everyone contributes equally to everything. Even then, what are the odds that eveyone will be credited equally?
Similarly, the project manager isn't doing his job if one person is "so essential that time off becomes unacceptable". Yes, it happens all the time; for crunch periods it may be a necessary evil, but only if the crunch is the result of uncontrollable external factors. Bad project mgmt != uncontrollable external factor.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
That replace the KDE logos. A bunch of lamers trying to pretend as if it's their shit. It's not.
Fuckings to them.
--exa--
legislating developers' name on a screensaver leaves a bad taste in the mouth, honestly. If I had written any significant F/OSS, I would not feel nearly as good about knowing that the license was forcing my name to be displayed on the screen. I would feel nice if someone voluntarily put it up, sure.
Marketers would not want to "un-necessarily'" give credit. Agreed. Not every company selling (services for) open-source code might be doing it for this reason, though.
I can think of two more reasons: (a) they genuinely think that they are reducing information confusing to the (target) user; that their graphic is good; (b) they did not realize that the developers are feeling they are not getting enough credit.
There is merit in the idea that credit to people who write FOSS could be more prominent. There is also a gentler way to do this, IMHO. Like, "Hey Debian dudes! Good work on that release. BTW, my wishlist for the next one is a screensaver that would display names of authors who wrote the packages I installed. Here's a graphic for the background, and here's how I think one could go about it...".
If enough people support this idea and implement it, then the need to enforce it will not be needed. If some notable exception exists, one could consider license as a way to enforce it.
--sdem
Post continued below following legal credits...
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This post copyright 2003 by http://slashdot.org/~anonymous-coward
All rights reserved.
Typing done by anonymous coward
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Imagine if every page served by Apache were accompanied by a page of credits? Eeek!
Reiser has already lost countless users for his software because he started polluting the kernel messages with "a message from his sponsors".
He should be more concerned with the quality of his software, not with his ego problems. Personally, I find this disgusting. If someone wants to know who wrote the software, he can read the README or ask google.
I don't even have the slightest reference in my free software source code that point back to me, I don't even use huge copyright comments in my software like the GNU project generally does, and yet people have offered me jobs and asked me about my software many times. In general, the people who want to know who wrote the software, do.
Those who try to rub it in their face all the time will cheapen free software for everyone. It's like the "I'm so important!1!!" freeware movement from MS-DOS, and I barely remember a single author from all the software that rubbed their copyright messages it in my face all the time. In contrast, I even learned to know several free software authors personally!
Hans, people are losing data with your file system. I know because I did. Twice. Then I looked at your fsck code and it stunk to the high heavens. You should be concerned with that, not with putting your name in the face of more people.
And what would be the next step? To insert a few seconds delay so people have a chance to see your messages better? Puleeze!
Here, go read:
a fairly unpleasant thread started by Mr. Reiser himself.
He has a point, but surely it doesn't hurt to be slightly less aggressive on these matters. Unless he enjoys being credited as an asshole...
And, you'd have balkanization on how it should be implemented. Boot messages? Splash screens? If users get annoyed with these, they'd want to turn them off, and someone would find a way to do so. If a user wants to know who wrote a piece of free software, many times this is not difficult to obtain.
I guess I just see it as being unenforcible and unnecessary.
We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of the dreams.
I haven't written very much code that I've opened to friends / others to distribute, but the bit that I have hasn't even had my name in the source code. I don't write "Creditware" and when I think of people who's projects are driven by their egos rather than a desire to just get a job done I think of software packages that are generally full of flashy features with questionable reliability and are the most aggressively defended when people want to add a feature that doesn't align closely with the author's original intent (which makes sense because the more the author's name is attached to it the more you're affecting his/her identity with your feature).
This said, I'm certainly not against respecting authors identities and their wishes WRT maintaining any branding they choose for their product, but if someone's version of a program is going to pop up a page of text enumerating their life story, possibly obscuring some warning message I really should be reading, I'm going to look very hard for alternatives.
-Dan
From the article: I propose that we as a community insist that all distros make the default screensaver be one that randomly displays a different detailed credit for one of the authors of Linux software every 60 seconds.
Erm.. Is Python or Perl or Apache or Emacs - "Linux software"? What about FreeBSD or OpenBSD - that's hardly "Linux software"...
I'm surprised to see someone as knowledgeable as Riser make such a blunder - or is it intentional?
grisha.org
vosbert has a really good point. I like the idea of things belonging to the community more than to any individual person. Yet there is a way that an analogy should be made to art here. If you like a sculpture, or a piece of code, you should be able to find the artist/designer. So, perhaps v would say that having credit in the source code is enough, that anyone who really wants to find the designer, could. But the name of the artist adds to the work (yet perhaps only for marketing reasons?)
I spend a minute being torn.
I thought that I was going to post that while Reiser's suggestion that linux have a mandatory screen saver that flashes credit is totally micro$oftesque in its totalitarianism, but his point is well-taken, and oss designers deserve credit. Instead, your comment really convinced me. Anyone who wants to find the designers can by looking in the source code. What user would be searching for a designer who couldn't get it togeher to look in the source code? And what *other* sort of person would care who wrote linux or anything else? The glory of OSS comes from being a shared project in every senes. Let's keep the focus on that. Kudos to vosbert for convincing me.
"This edition of KDE is brought to you in part by Tide(TM). Tide(TM), it's the Tidest. And also by the financial support of coders like you."
Open up Adobe Photoshop. You will se a list of names on the splash screen, I assume they are all contributing producers, engineers, and coders. Am I right? It is also in the about screen of most porgrams, give credit where credit is due.
It seems history, even short term history repeats itself. This was tried in the past by the BSD license and was taken out because it is way too onerous. The problems with requiring such credit are well enumerated by the Free Software Foundation in the essay entitled "The BSD License Problem".
On the surface, it sounds like a good idea until you consider what it means to give prominent credit to all the major people who are involved with a piece of software. The larger a project is the larger the number of active participants. More importantly when a project gets large enough it acquires dependencies that provide significant functionality which also are as deserving of credit as the original application developers.
For example I built a news aggregator that is an now a source code available project on GotDotNet that has 70 developers signed up with about a dozen having been active in one shape or the other. There are also dependencies on three external libraries that also provide significant functionality. If this was a commercial product exactly how feasible would it be for me to give prominence to everyone who provided significant value to the application? What metric would I use?
Screensavers with credits? Splashscreens with credits?
No-one wants this shit. If Hans wants to put it it reiserfs, let him feel free to, but I'll compile it all out, or switch to XFS.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I've seen your work in Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, sir, and I have to tell you, I'm impressed.
Get your dick outta the peanut butter, cause you're fuckin' nuts!
Does the ReiserFS in Linux 2.6 supports files as directories? And does it support really small files efficiently (i.e, you could convert an XML file into a directory tree and it would not be any less efficient)?
a) If it's an OSS project, then if they're using a source control system, can't you see who wrote it? Or maybe there would be mailing list where someone could ask who wrote this cool code?
b) I just have this horrible vision of millions of lines of credits buzzing past the screen as Linux boots...
Give them credit, sure. Congrats to all the authors of the software on my box. But perhaps we are confusing who will see it, and whether they care. Having credits != giving credit.
a) above is for those that really want to give credit. b) is merely gratuitous self praise.
(Yes I did read the linked discussion)
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
From the article:
"I propose that we as a community insist that all distros make the default screensaver be one that randomly displays a different detailed credit for one of the authors of Linux software every 60 seconds."
This will certainly be the doom for open source software, specially Linux. Would you, or any company use software that displayed beards and glasses every minute? Let me answer that for you: -For God's sake, I'll pay for It! just get off the screen!
I don't need people to see me in some splashs screen. In fact I presonaly hate splas screens, and remove them from every opensource project I use. It would be nice to see an "about" dialog w/ credit to thoes who helped, but to make something like that mandatory is rather asburd, and pointless. An example situation is found above; The developers will just make a new liscens w/o the "credit clause". Mr. Reiser isn't the first to suggest this, but his FS is used by many (not me tho, I don't like it)
``Money is unimportant only to those who don't work to create it."
Right on, Mr. Reiser.
The users of the software probably won't care and most authors who write software really don't do it for fame or they could just plaster their names all over the software (which I rarely see). Perhaps there is something else motivating people to write software.. for instance.. If I sit down and write a zeroconf enabled server daemon for whatever it's probably because I need it or want to use it. Not for fame, because honestly, I could care less who used the shit so long as it worked for me. The blood, sweat and tears pays off in being able to have zeroconf enabled whatever. If other people can benefit then thats great, if they can help make it better thats another plus and if it helps someone else solve a problem in shorter time or makes their life easier then that's gold right there. Usually you get dumps of email from people thanking you for something you just wanted yourself.. It's great.. You get bored? Feel like moving on?? People who were helping with code tend to take up the slack and so the cycle continues.
If people want to know who wrote the software they'll just look it up. I mean in GUI software there is an "About" dialog that exists solely for info such as stuff in cli utils at the start of the program you can put name of author and email address as most other people do. Or through it into a --help argc or something.
Also the idea of having someones name plastered all over your personal computer doesn't make it feel that personal anymore. A user will just begin to tune the shit out, and if you write shit like BIND or BitchX etc you catch enough flack.
The idea is to 'advertise' Linux software?
Great! So long as on FreeBSD I don't have to see "This GNU/Linux software brought to you by." I'll be happy.
If I wanted an 'advertising clause', I'd still look to the 4 clause BSD licence.
Only the insecure and hardup feel the need to take credit. Look, I'm gifting the world with this post, and by remaining anonymous, I'm not even taking credit for it.
I don't remember who said it on the Debian mailing list, but the sentiment was right:
You can either have control, or you can write free software.
Period.
A great deal of modern philosophy holds that individual egos are bad. We need to supress the individual for the good of society. Companies never mention anything about who their employees are. People are anonymous drones behind the corporate brand, etc..
That we do so much to suppress the individual is the main reason why some many people find Ayn Rand a breath of fresh air. It is wonderful to read a work that extols the individual, even if the work gets a bit silly at times.
Except for a few CEOs, the whole computer industry has been pretty much faceless. I think it would be great to see more faces and names attached to computer software. I would hate to see slathering, but a longer list of references would be interesting.
The downside, of course, is that only the names of avid self promoters will make the list. A great deal of free software is created by someone reverse engineering or often copying code from others. There is also a tendency of people claiming the title System Architect to snag ideas from coders and testers.
It is disheartening, when you are in the trenches, to see someone you despise using your work in their self promotions.
When you get down to it. The majority of foundational work in computer science has been done already. To a great extent the work that goes into OSS is porting ideas between platforms, honing ideas and testing. The names that would appear today would largely be the names of people who are porting technologies between platforms.
The legitimacy of the names will always be in question, but I like the idea of greater recognition for the people behind the scenes. I think it would be great for people in the world to know programmers' names along with the CEOs and venture capitalists.
If the "gift economy" is to take off, you need credit--and it needs to be trustable. Think about it, crazy faith healers make tons of money from donations--why shouldn't free software developers? I'd rather it be slathered with begging for donations (not registration) than for advertisements.
Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't want to slap such a clause to anything I wrote. First, I think the egoboo factor is totally overstated. For instance, I wrote a small vocab building app called gretools. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch: to help me with my gre preparation. Ego satisfaction had nothing to do with it. I released it only as an afterthought. Second, what's the point of having J. Random user being being forced to see your name? If you want to build a reputation as a programmer, you would want to build up that reputation with other programmers, which is what you get currenty because your name is in the source. In suspect, most users could consider it as unwanted ads/annoyance. We're trying to get people to use OSS by removing annoyances (like popup blocking), introducing our own forms of annoyance is self defeating. Third, Reiser specifically wants political statements irremovable and visible to users. This is bad. Being free means creating software without trying to impose your idealogy on others. There are practical problems too. You are unnecessarily limiting your user base. If, for instance, your political message included praise for the Falun Gong, it could well lead to any distro that includes your package being banned in the PRC, because you made your statement irremovable. I wonder how many programmers would choose to adopt such a license. Fourth, OSS companies are trying hard to stay afloat and make some money. The better these companies survive, the better your chances of becoming/staying gainfully employed coding Free software. Give them a chance. Don't view them as capitalist evil and impede them from establishing a brand.
That's just my opinion. You are free to pick your license.
Just don't slatther up code with it. Put a credits page up on your web site and be done with it.
I'm so sick of people trying to cram ads down my throat just because they feel they can get away with it.
:)
Whether it's pop-up ads, spam, TV inset-credit ads, junk mail, telemarketing, ATM fees, TV channel logos, billboards, etc. The long and annoying list goes on and on and keeps growing.
More and more, I'm getting pissed off about the multitude of intrusions on my time and attention. If I cared about whether brand A was better than brand B, i'd look into it myself, otherwise it's just an annoyance to be so informed.
If anyone is particularly interested, or if the software is remarkable in some way, i.e. small, useful, or innovative, then people will find out who's responsible for authoring that piece of work if they care.
But if they don't, then they don't want to endure YET ANOTHER GOD-DAMNED AD.
If the software authors want credit for their work, that's fine, I don't begrudge them that. I'm a software author myself. In fact, I co-wrote one of the most popular ray-tracing programs out there, and my name is on the list of contributors.
The actual software never had my name in it, just in the docs, but people knew me, and had no problem finding out who I was and how to get a hold of me for questions and advice.
I still can list the software on my resume, if I feel that it's relevant to the position I'm seeking. When I do, most people recognise or have heard of it. The fame is still there waiting, bottled up until needed
Anyhow, without being overbearingly egotistical, I managed to get and enjoy my 15 minutes of fame without pissing anyone off and without cramming my name down everyone's throat.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/03/084322 8&mode=thread
fucking. egomaniac.
Yes, today I associate the name Reiser with the Reiser filesystem. But, first I thought of a French cartoonist Jean Marc Reiser (see a tribute page[no, I'm not French]). If you haven't seen his cartoons before, go check them out. Beware, it is dirty underware humor, literally, and any connection with file systems seem farflung indeed.
Why not just have someone register and maintain softwarecredits.org and then request that distro maintainers and FS/OSS browsers ship with it as the default webpage. That way people will know of it, and they can still change the default page if they want?
Or is this too logical? =P
Personally I feel credit is given to me in various ways.
- Downloads counts stay fairly consistent and gradually seem to be rising.
- Occasional email saying that they like it or even better sometimes coupled witha request for new feature or bug.
- Simply doing a google of my project shows sites all over the place.
I figure people who give me credit on their own free will, by performing their own reviews and such good or bad, that certainly helps me to make better software and that is all i really want to do anyhow. It is diifcult enough to write something unique and useful these days and on top of that stand out in the mix of commerical apps. So people who have contributed to the linux kernal have obivous unspoken credit that they know companies like RedHat are using thier work, likewise with mozilla developers one being funded by AOL to some extent as wellas being used in AOL's software, to me that is credit and prestige that is pretty rare for most of the OSS projects out there.One day I hope to see my stuff being reused elsewhere, and as long as they just say it somewhere that i helped out, I couldn't ask for more.
Hans has done an enormous amount of really high-quality work and deserves fair compensation and recognition for it. He's got every right to have his code display all the credits that he sees fit.
On the other hand, the moment you say that these credits cannot be removed (or suppressed from being displayed by default) then you no longer have a fully free license. That's what the problem was with the old BSD license with the advertising clause (that used to make BSD code incompatible with the GPL until that was removed), and that's the same problem with invarient sections in the GNU Free Documentation License that caused such a stink recently. The GPL doesn't allow any additional restrictions either, and since Hans' code is available under the GPL, the best he can do is ask that people are respectful of the credits. There's no legal recourse if they aren't (other than maybe to get mad, and quit GPL'ing future versions). This leads to the question -- maybe there should be a new free software license that attempts to protect author credits while remaining otherwise free?
That said, I'd have to say that anyone who would remove credits from free software simply because the license doesn't (or can't) prohibit it is being a rude parasite. A good member of the community has more respect for the contributions of others.
Just grab the source and remove the credits and recompile. Sheesh! Is this rocket science or what?
The guy (Hans) loves himself a little too much. I remeber reading some posts he's written about his FS and issuses w/ Redhat. Every time I read his posts, it just seems to come across as saying "Love Me!". Him writing this article doesn't suprise me. Don't be fooled, the article is about him, not software writers in general, I believe.
-Robert
Help -> About is a good place to list credits.
Or maybe developers could start adding Help -> Credits menus to software.
I do think it's important that developers get credit, but do it in a way that's not counter productive to the end users of the software.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I think a good way to credit a large number of developers, is to make a splash screen with the bottom quarter scrolling the names of authors/contributors. The user would simply have to click to proceed. That's unobtrusive and might even generate some interest in the user - who might one day stop and read the whole list.
Or perhaps instead of requiring a click, have the splash screen time out after a few seconds, but put a button on it labeled "click here for the credits!" - again unobtrusive.
But that still doesn't take care of stuff that doesn't have a GUI - like ReiserFS.
Look, people should get credit for their work. That's really a pretty simple basic moral. I don't agree with Reiser's method of achieving such (the advertisements displayed whenever using his utils), but we need to properly attribute credit.
I'm also not sure I agree with the FSF' new documentation license that's coming out, having "invariable sections".
It's very simple. What RedHat's doing is plaguarism. They have replaced the KDE symbol with one of their own; this implied to end-users that RedHat made it. They are effectively taking credit for someone else' work. This is wrong.
We as a community should shun those who try to take credit for that which is not their own. I believe that Debian's current issue is that they think that the new GPL documentation license is not free, and I think they have a good argument. However, that does not make it ok to plaguarize other people's work. We should refuse to buy software by distributers like RedHat who plaguarize other people's work. Period. This is as immoral as me posting something written by Dickens and claiming it's mine. So, we should put pressure on RedHat to make more effort to attribute others for their work. We should also make a stronger effort to do that ourselves, and thank others for their contributions. And there are ways to do such that don't involve obnoxious messages (e.g., About).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
From what I can tell, this proposes turning OSS into a mild form of adware - randomly displaying credits for developers. Not as bad as, say, "free gambling online" or "eliminate debts now!" in adware like KaZaA (not Lite), but still an annoyance.
The reason I write software is to fulfill a need that I have, not to get my name in the "most famous programmer" slot... I think many programmers are the same.
"annoying pleas for money?"
hate to break it to ya, already been done.
This seems far too invasive. I too write free software, and I'm happy that users can see credits if they ask for them.
:)
After all, almost all graphical applications have a "Help->About" menu crediting the authors of the software. Why not introduce a standard command line switch similar to --help/-? eg: --credit or something?
So if a user cares, they can ask for a list of everyone who worked on the software?
Just my tuppence
For example, Richard Stallman's attempts to claim Linux as his own ("It's GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Linux! It's mine, all mine, I say!) are obnoxious and betray his lust for power and control.
that you named the software REISERfs, Mr Reiser?
Remember what Mahatma Ghandi said:
"I must reduce my ego to zero".
Or maybe you should reduce yours to 'zero' and 'one'!
Grtz
Take it a step further, and actually read Reiser's article.. here's my favourite part. With this little gem, Hans reveals that he is totally, unequivocally out to lunch. The rest of the article is nearly as bad..
Yeah Hans, it's not because the K is farking stupid or makes free software look like childish Krap; it's Klearly a Konspiracy!
Users don't care, Hans. I skip channels, block popups, and kill adware faster than you can say "fuck the users." I suspect that many of the 0.3% of computer owners who use Linux full-time feel the same way.
I guess that's all I've got to say on the matter.
try any of these:
or if it has a GUI, go to "Help->About"how about rendering some Curly Brawl - like scenes with the developers in place of Nyo ? It would be fun...for example, Linus kicking Gates again and again and again...
Remember "MacPaint by Bill Atkinson"?. For years, that appeared at the top of every MacPaint window.
One, I'm currently in the process of re-reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by ESR. In it, he discusses how ego boosting is by nature frowned upon. I'm surprised that Hans has felt compelled to take this point up.
Two, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of ways for authors to get recognition in a project.
Bottom line: grow up Hans.
P.S. random "unknown" hackers
- Larry Wall
- Linus Torvalds
- Richard Stallman
- Andrew Tigdell
- Guido van Rossum
But Hans is right, programmers don't get credit for their work.Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
> Beware, it is dirty underware humor, literally, and any connection with file systems seem farflung indeed.
Until a filesystem utility scrambles your master's thesis. Then they take on a cause-effect relationship.
how many of them out there?
I agree with Hans about the academic culture's value of giving credits. However, there are two points worth mentioning.
About Dialogue: This is another place where they have credits showing at least the name of the main authors and the current maintainer. For instance:
ZZZZ@quark:~$ chown --versionchown (fileutils) 4.1
Written by David MacKenzie.
Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-05-03 19:54:57 UTC (2003-05-03 15:54:57 EDT)
Pardon my stupidity.
(Score: -10x10^128, Pro-Free-Software)
Say I want to run ls. Then I can just do:
$ man ls | col -b | grep -A1 'AUTHOR' | tail -1 | awk '{print $3" "$4}'
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
The "Community" doesn't own software; the authors do.
If the authors want their names displayed, they can insist on it. If they don't care, then why should anyone else?
Have no illusions -- this is what Hans Reiser is worried about, his business. The morality of giving credit-where-due is a red herring.
The debate that sparked this off was Debian removing 20-something lines of crap about sponsors from mkreiserfs. That scares him, because it weakens his power in promoting his sponsors and his brand.
To which I say tough. The GPL was written to ensure that users could make software serve them. If a GPLed program spews unhelpful messages, then anybody has the right to remove them. Incidentally, it's undoubtedly justified in this case, when there's a screenful of rubbish, and the program is regularly used in stressful, recovery situations, potentially on a terminal with no scrollback.
Nobody, I imagine, advocates removing authorship credits entirely, but the GPL does not guarantee free promotion for your company, sponsors, or anything else. If that's what you wanted, you were plain stupid to choose the GPL in the first place.
Maybe embedding your name in a program isn't so good an idea if it gives SCO or MSFT lawyers an easy target. Maybe rpm or apt-get could be enhanced to have an option to list developer names as it installs or uninstalls software.
We're all coders and whatnot, right? We'd all love to think that if we shove our info down peoples throats, they will bow down to our abilities. But realize that if we make our products the best we can make them and then appease our own vanity by placing our credits everywhere, the users will move to a product that doesn't place vanity in front of productivity. Our job is to solve problems and help people get work done, plain and simple.
..with those who take the debian line; as someone anonymously posted to newsforge, "Even the FSF's attempt to require credit in the GFDL is being considered non-free by the Debian project"; and as he or she goes on to point out, Debian ARE usually fairly thorough on principled issues like this. The point, to my mind, of FREE software is that it's free. And whilst the word 'free' has the immediate connutation of lacking monetary compensation, that's not all that the word means. For me, for something to be free requires it not to have certain other obligations attached to it; it goes against my principles - and against the karma of the notion of free software - to tie advertising into freely distributed software in this way. If authors really can't do without this manner of crediting in projects which they've contributed to of their own free will, perhaps they shouldn't have contributed to them for free in the first place?
How many slashdot readers run adware.. and why?.. how long might it be before 'free' software which had advertising in this manner decided that 'trading' adverts with other software authors would increase their user base? Really, it wouldn't take very much bending of the rules before free software looked like free websites. And do we really want geocities on our desktops?
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
Ego is surely not the only motivation for writing free software, but it is the one that we as a community can make more effective as a motivation. Not everyone contributes to charity for the sake of fame, but respecting those who perform charity is a good thing for society to do even when reputation is not sufficient to make the charitable act worthwhile.
There is a definable difference between credits and ads. Credits describe how someone contributed. Ads attempt to sell something other than the program.
Credits are the clearly good part of what the entertainment industry does. Ads are the evil they found necessary, or at least the evil they desired, and maybe we won't share it with them. I personally would rather pay than be advertised to: my time is expensive. I don't mind watching credits, somehow I respect them enough to not mind them.
This "People First" posting above describes the poetic foundation of a belief that I share, and it does a lot to convey why the members of this discussion disagree.
I don't agree with the bottom part of what he writes though, when he says that most of the good ideas have been found in CS, rather I think that ideas multiply, and the more ideas have been found, the more ideas can be found.
Best To All,
Hans
The idea of owning an idea is just ridiculous.
My Blog
As long as it's not popup windows. Heh.
He wants the default screensaver/splash screen to contain credits for the developers, rather then the people who packaged the distro, as is the case today. He's not saying that they should stay that way forever. Damn, learn to read.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
GNU/Reiser/Linux ??
I would seriously probably run it.... unless of course it were shoved down my friggin throat. Really bad idea to mandate any default screensaver, splash screen bash prompt, etc. in a "free" license. I mean that's just about the best example of an oxymoron I could think of.
...Twice a year, instead of doing what it's supposed to do, the program would instead tell you how great Free Software is, and ask for your pledge to support Free Software, before continuing with the regular programming
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
>I think reiserfs is great.. realy, i'am using nothing else... it saves
>so much time on diskchecking after a crash. and it does the entire
>journal thingy MUCH better than ext3
>
>
That's because you're a brain-dead buzzword-spewing bandwagon jumper from the Windows camp who's never used anything other than that bug-ridden joke of an fs called reiserfs. Reiserfs always was a joke and always will be a joke.
I believe that Richard Stallman wrote most of the original GNU C compiler, although it was derived partly from a portable optimizer from a 1978 Univeristy of Arizona research project.
"GNU `diff' was written by Mike Haertel, David Hayes, Richard Stallman, Len Tower, and Paul Eggert."
"GNU Make was written by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath."
"Richard Stallman was the original author of GDB, and of many other GNU programs."
Remember that free software is like free speech, not free beer. If I write an article, free speech means you can quote from it (with attribution) and you can use ideas from it (without attribution). I would be likely to allow you to redistribute it in whole (with attribution). Nothing in the term "free speech" means that you can claim authorship of it.
I don't see why "free software" should be any different. There is nothing in the term "free software" that can be construed to allow you to claim authorship for code you didn't contribute to.
If lack of attribution is reducing the number of developers of free software, then that is a problem that should be resolved to ensure the future growth of free software.
Support SETI@home
I agree. But why do we need to deal with this issues in the form of license requirements? It's just enough to propose the idea. The actual contributors should be taking care of the details. Additionlly, splash screens don't have enough space to hold all of the contributors. Some names might have *higher* priorities, but who will decide the rankings? Will every developer be happy with the splash screen *policy*? The random display can be a workaround here, but I don't think it's a general solution that will promote the credits of the authors. Actually, we can check the CREDITS file and the Help-About dialog box when we are wondering about the names of the contributors.
However, it is still a good idea to let users know who are actually contributing to the open source software project. But it will be a complicated problem when this credit information display is enforced as a license requirement. Let the project contributors decide what will be displayed in their splash screen; but don't make it a license requirement.
In contrast, for ext3 in "ordered" mode, although we also do metadata-only journaling, it is made sure that data blocks gets written before metadata pointing to them, so if a power failure happens when overwriting a file, you either see the new contents (if the metadata got updated) or the old contents (if not), no data will be lost.
So this does not seem to be a bug in reiserfs, but it does mean that you have lower data integrity gurantees than in ext3 ordered mode (actually it seems to be worse than ext2 --- maybe something needs tweaking). Alas, few users are aware of this before they got bitten.
Anyway, if you have some frequently overwritten and very important data (like your term paper), I think it is better to store them on ext3 (data=ordered/journal) partitions than reiserfs partitions, if you want to protect them from power failures. Also, it would be great if ReiserFS gets similar features as "data=ordered" in ext3.
(I'm not an expert on this subject. Please correct any errors I made.)
He wrote a large portion of the original gcc, which you likely have used on occasion, and either primarily wrote or contributed to a huge percentage of the software and utilities you use on a day-to-day basis.
Or to take a very simple example, the following appears in the manpage for 'ls' on Debian and many other Linux distributions:
AUTHOR
Written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
the crux of the matter is limited mindshare. in an elightened society w/o these kinds of limits, slack is the better currency; slack is what allows people who know you (and your work) to shrug off minor (or even major) transgressions in favor of a postponed evaluation. lazy binding, baby!
how much to postpone then becomes the question. presumably when you are dead there is no point postponing further, unless you've written some really good self-modifying code, or planted the seeds thereof in enough people who are willing to prefix their credit to yours. and, face it, that's something that's outside your control.
Thanks to Hans Reiser for making my day more entertaining :)
On the other hand, Brett Glass's attempts to discredit the GPL are obnoxious and betray his need for other people to do his (clearly day-job, money-making) work for him.
...but it isn't "slathered" throughout the software. There has always been a special place for credits.
Click Help, About.
What is plastering your name and visage all over the software gonna do? It's going to make the users know who to hate. For example:
"HI! I'm Peter Norton. My fantastic diagnostic software has detected a segment fault, and your program will now close, and all data will be lost.
You can prevent these problems by using my fantastic optimization software, my fantastic Backup Software, and my fantastic hard disk software."
Peter Norton made one really useful program in 1990, and then his ego exploded. Since then, the quality of the software has suffered, and the users now have to suffer seeing his big ugly mug everytime they run defrag.
Oh well, it seems everything is becoming more superficial. Computer case modding has become a little out of control, and the quality of the hardware has suffered. My computer doesn't work right because it tends to overheat (no, I'm *NOT* overclocking it). I can't even buy an effective fan and heat-sink because all the fans have blinky lights, neon colored plastic, and grills in the shape of an alien head. I don't need any of those features... it's going to be INSIDE my plain beige RECTANGULAR case. I want it to Just Plain Work(TM).
Same for software. It should Just Plain Work!
Speaking of giving credit, this comment was copied and pasted from MY comment on Newsforge. Are you that pathetic that you can't come up with your own ideas?
--Drunk as in Beer
Another comment plagiarized from Newsforge.