On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 02:59:47PM -0500, Felix Blyakher wrote:
>
> Anyway, I'm passing it to the legal department at SGI.
>
You might want to forward them my corrections to the commentary, and
Andrew Morton's Signed-off-by.
You may also want to point out to them that at the moment, they are
hosting on the SGI OSS site something which is labelled:
* Copyright (C) 1991, NeXT Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserverd.
I can't imagine most company's legal deparments being happy about
hosting something like this on their CVS, Web, or FTP servers. I'm
guessing that because "All Rights Reserved" was mispelled, it wasn't
noticed in the original due diligence review which I *presume* they
did before giving approval for exporting the xfstests tree outside
SGI.
So the copyright and lineage analysis I did gives them a way out,
without having to do something embarassing such as yanking the
xfstests CVS tree off of oss.sgi.com --- and given that there's a GIT
tree which is probably replicated in hundreds of machines all over the
Internet, it's not like removing the CVS tree would really help...
it's well and truly published, all over the world.
In the worst case, we could start with the APSL 2.0 version, probably
the one from FreeBSD, and then add back the ext3tools enhancements
which Andrew has agreed to release under the APSL, and then have the
SGI-authored bits and pieces added back --- and then they can find
whoever added "All Rights Reserved" version of fsx.c, without getting
the copyright situation clearned up, and either (a) slap them around a
bit, or (b) force them to retake the OSS legal training class. :-)
I used to think it was a mindless bureaucracy which caused IBM to
require every employee working with OSS to receive OSS legal/copyright
training every year, at the beginning of the year --- but now I'm
beginning to think it's not paranoia, but a Really Good Idea, given
how long (and how many) people apparently allowed this situation to
fester....
- Ted
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