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

Mark Cave-Ayland mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk
Fri Feb 5 19:15:45 CET 2016


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.




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