This time sending the reply to OpenBios...
On 2016-Feb-12 16:40 , BALATON Zoltan wrote:
[...] I still think that including the actual copyright string (even if obfuscated) is legally more questionable than using a string that is clearly for compatibility only as suggested before in these posts:
http://www.openfirmware.info/pipermail/openbios/2015-May/008703.html http://www.openfirmware.info/pipermail/openbios/2015-June/008710.html
I think Apple expected the year part to be updated every year so it can be expected that those chars are not checked and if we ever find a Mac OS version that does, we could change it then. This would also avoid the unnecessarily complicated obfuscation that may not have any usefulness against legal problems and just make this a one line forth patch. But IANAL so I don't really know what I'm talking about so I don't mind either way. (Do you have any reason to think that the obfuscated version is better than the straightforward way? If not why not keep it simple?)
The presence of "copyright <company>" in plain text in either sources or binary attracts lawyer's attention. When I was employed by Oracle, had we been interested in picking up OpenBios sources for some reason (a couple of projects suggested it a couple of times), the presence of "copyright apple" (with or without a year, with or without a comment saying "we don't mean it") would have flat completely blocked any such attempt.
You're better off with an obfuscated string which doesn't match blind string comparisons.