[OpenBIOS] [PATCH] add copyright message to root node at startup

BALATON Zoltan balaton at eik.bme.hu
Fri Feb 5 18:53:22 CET 2016


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.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016, Programmingkid wrote:
> That could cause problems. There might be versions of the Mac OS that 
> depend on the whole copyright string being there.

In the first place, there might be reasons why Mac OS depends on this 
copyright notice and this may be that copying this message is protected by 
some law. This is similar to the key needed by Mac OS X.

> I don't know if they would ever sue someone for doing that. If they did 
> it would be all the hackintosh websites that would go down first. I say 
> we stay away from Apple's naughty list and error on the side of caution.

It could be argued that including a string obfuscated is more effort to 
circumvent this protection which is probably worse than just including the 
string in plain text until asked not to do that so I'm not sure doing 
obfuscation is really better.

On the other hand we could also do the same as for OS X that the string 
has to be passed on the command line, which could avoid any legal problems 
on the side of QEMU or OpenBIOS.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan



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