Hans Reiser has it right. Authors of free software deserve to be credited wherever their software is used or talked about. I went to extreme lengths in my book to note the author of every module I mentioned, and I'm glad I did (despite the fact that many reviewers were annoyed by all the footnotes).
-sam
Of course, he's only saying this because he has his axe to grind; in short, Debian don't like the fact that reiserfs's fsck displays a screenful of credits, and Hans doesn't like the fact that they modified his free software (under the terms of the license he released it under) to stop it from doing so.
Re:Hans Reiser is on crack
samtregar on 2003-05-03T22:53:33
Sure, Hans is on crack. I've read enough of the Linux kernel mailing-list to know that. However, I don't think that automatically makes him wrong.Personally, I would prefer not to try to fix problems in the free software community through restrictive licensing (like an advertising clause). However, I do agree with Hans that the lack of prominent attribution is a problem. And I see no reason to believe he's being insincere just because he's fighting about similar issues with the Debian maintainers.
-sam
