[gPXE-devel] [PULL] ipxe-sync

Michael Brown mbrown at fensystems.co.uk
Thu Jul 8 11:43:57 EDT 2010


On Thursday 08 Jul 2010 15:45:50 Marty Connor wrote:
> >> Quoting numbers like 60% is poor form.
> >
> > You are welcome to keep it at 0%.  I have no particular interest in
> > having my code backported into the gPXE tree.
> 
> But you seem just fine with using the 40% (by your calculations) of work
> from gPXE contributors that you have added to your iPXE fork. ;)

Your math skills are in need of refreshing, if you think that's what my 
calculations show.

(Hint: even after the bulk backporting of changes, the two trees are still 
quite substantially different.)

> Clever misdirection, but my point central remains.  Your numbers only
> count contributions _you_ have decided are "equally-worthwhile", which
> (surprise!) lets you once more promote your fork, iPXE!!  Wow, what an
> amazing coincidence! :)

This isn't something new I've introduced just to allow me to illustrate a 
point; the idea to record non-code contributions is one that we discussed 
together at the time (pretty much immediately following the 0.9.7 release, as 
can been seen from the git log), and it's been happening ever since.

> Or, we can see about finding and removing the relevant code or rewriting
> it, and no longer have to deal with what you think is "appropriate".
> 
> My point being that there are multiple ways to deal with such
> situations, not just the one you propose.

I didn't write the PMM spec or copyright law, this has nothing to do with what 
I might or might not think is "appropriate".

If you want to follow the PMM specification then your use of PMM handles has to 
follow that specification.  You either get your own vendor ID, or you follow 
the rules set down by the vendor who owns the ID you are using.  As long as 
you don't introduce changes that break compatibility with the officially-
assigned usage then you're welcome to keep using the existing ID in gPXE.

As for copyright: you can find some relevant explanation at 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html - in essence, you have no legal 
standing to enforce GPL violations (which, in law, are simply copyright 
violations) in code over which you do not hold the copyright.  If you do 
discover a GPL violation thanks to any of the embedded magic numbers in my 
code, and you contact the violator, then my understanding is that they would 
be entitled to simply ignore you.

If you want to remove all code that bears my copyright from gPXE so that you 
don't have to worry about such issues, then please be my guest.  (The easiest 
way to achieve this would be for you to revert the tree back to Etherboot 5.0 
and start afresh from there.)

Michael


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