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

[BALATON Zoltan]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2016, Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
> 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.

Even if the plain text string says:

Copyright IS NOT BY Apple Computer, Inc; THIS STRING IS JUST FOR COMPATIBILITY WITH MacOS

or something like that? So it's not a comment with a string that 
looks like a copyright message but actually clearly not a copyright 
message.

> You're better off with an obfuscated string which doesn't match blind
> string comparisons.

I think we don't agree on this (they will find it anyway once they list 
the device tree from anything they boot with it so I don't think 
obfuscation solves any problem just tries to hide it) but as I've said I 
don't mind it either way just think the obfuscation is ugly and probably 
unnecessary overcautiousness (is that a word in English?) until there's 
some evidence that it's needed. And we could still add that complication 
when there is some evidence in the future.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan