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From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
Message-Id: <199508301109.EAA07912@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
Subject: Re: copyright notices for ports/packages
To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami)
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 04:09:04 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, paul@FreeBSD.org, ports@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199508300855.BAA17783@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> from "Satoshi Asami" at Aug 30, 95 01:55:00 am
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> 
>  * Please do not install Copyright files with the binaries as it has no
>  * legal significance.
> 
> Well ok so maybe it has no legal significance, but I think it's just
> fair for us to recognize the fine work of the authors who made these
> things available for free.
> 
> Yeah I don't like shoving GPL in the face of the user to do that
> either but many copyright notices include nice lists of
> acknowledgements and stuff that I really like to put somewhere the
> user can easily find.

Perhaps you should write a guide for ``freeware'' port writers that
includes these types of details so they start to provide a nice little
file just like what you need :-).

Then send your guide out to the 300+ authors of the current FreeBSD
ported software packages as your contribution to the future promotion
of freeware.

Call it something catching and you make it big enough and you can turn
it into a Nutshell book and make a little $$$ on the side :-).

xv is a very good example of how to present this type of stuff in an
X application as one example.  The HP-UX and Apollo/HP DOMAIN OS boot
time copyright notice is another way for a text based system (the
copyright notices on these OS's is formidable and one of the few that
I have seen to be reasonably complete as far as covering all of
the code shipped with the OS :-)).

-- 
Rod Grimes                                      rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Accurate Automation Company                 Reliable computers for FreeBSD