[OpenBIOS] [PATCH 0/7] ppc: improve fake copyright message handling

[Tarl Neustaedter]

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.