On 05/02/16 17:53, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
Yeah, that's kind of how we ended up with what we have at the moment. In what we've seen so far (i.e. OS 9), the check isn't exact but that's not to say that all versions will be the same.
OK, but going with a string that is just enough for the OS versions we intend to support but not the exact copyright string may be less likely to cause legal problems and could postpone this question to when it is proven that we really need the whole string.
Well probably :) The problem here is that no-one actually knows and I'm currently erring on the side of over-engineering outside of having any concrete legal advice.
Unfortunately common sense does not really help in legal questions (maybe even an expert opinion is not sure unless tested on a trial) so we can only guess but I don't see how over-engineering could help here.
I've just posted an updated patchset which effectively makes it so that only the bootloader ever sees the message. It seems to me that there is a difference here in intent between directly expressing a copyright that isn't true vs. providing a synthetic response for clients that refuse to work without it, but really IANAL.
ATB,
Mark.