xref: /openbmc/linux/fs/reiserfs/README (revision 631dd1a8)
1[LICENSING]
2
3ReiserFS is hereby licensed under the GNU General
4Public License version 2.
5
6Source code files that contain the phrase "licensing governed by
7reiserfs/README" are "governed files" throughout this file.  Governed
8files are licensed under the GPL.  The portions of them owned by Hans
9Reiser, or authorized to be licensed by him, have been in the past,
10and likely will be in the future, licensed to other parties under
11other licenses.  If you add your code to governed files, and don't
12want it to be owned by Hans Reiser, put your copyright label on that
13code so the poor blight and his customers can keep things straight.
14All portions of governed files not labeled otherwise are owned by Hans
15Reiser, and by adding your code to it, widely distributing it to
16others or sending us a patch, and leaving the sentence in stating that
17licensing is governed by the statement in this file, you accept this.
18It will be a kindness if you identify whether Hans Reiser is allowed
19to license code labeled as owned by you on your behalf other than
20under the GPL, because he wants to know if it is okay to do so and put
21a check in the mail to you (for non-trivial improvements) when he
22makes his next sale.  He makes no guarantees as to the amount if any,
23though he feels motivated to motivate contributors, and you can surely
24discuss this with him before or after contributing.  You have the
25right to decline to allow him to license your code contribution other
26than under the GPL.
27
28Further licensing options are available for commercial and/or other
29interests directly from Hans Reiser: hans@reiser.to.  If you interpret
30the GPL as not allowing those additional licensing options, you read
31it wrongly, and Richard Stallman agrees with me, when carefully read
32you can see that those restrictions on additional terms do not apply
33to the owner of the copyright, and my interpretation of this shall
34govern for this license.
35
36Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
37fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits, without my
38permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
39If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
40fair, ask.  (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
41to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)
42
43[END LICENSING]
44
45Reiserfs is a file system based on balanced tree algorithms, which is
46described at https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
47
48Stop reading here.  Go there, then return.
49
50Send bug reports to yura@namesys.botik.ru.
51
52mkreiserfs and other utilities are in reiserfs/utils, or wherever your
53Linux provider put them.  There is some disagreement about how useful
54it is for users to get their fsck and mkreiserfs out of sync with the
55version of reiserfs that is in their kernel, with many important
56distributors wanting them out of sync.:-) Please try to remember to
57recompile and reinstall fsck and mkreiserfs with every update of
58reiserfs, this is a common source of confusion.  Note that some of the
59utilities cannot be compiled without accessing the balancing code
60which is in the kernel code, and relocating the utilities may require
61you to specify where that code can be found.
62
63Yes, if you update your reiserfs kernel module you do have to
64recompile your kernel, most of the time.  The errors you get will be
65quite cryptic if your forget to do so.
66
67Real users, as opposed to folks who want to hack and then understand
68what went wrong, will want REISERFS_CHECK off.
69
70Hideous Commercial Pitch: Spread your development costs across other OS
71vendors.  Select from the best in the world, not the best in your
72building, by buying from third party OS component suppliers.  Leverage
73the software component development power of the internet.  Be the most
74aggressive in taking advantage of the commercial possibilities of
75decentralized internet development, and add value through your branded
76integration that you sell as an operating system.  Let your competitors
77be the ones to compete against the entire internet by themselves.  Be
78hip, get with the new economic trend, before your competitors do.  Send
79email to hans@reiser.to.
80
81To understand the code, after reading the website, start reading the
82code by reading reiserfs_fs.h first.
83
84Hans Reiser was the project initiator, primary architect, source of all
85funding for the first 5.5 years, and one of the programmers.  He owns
86the copyright.
87
88Vladimir Saveljev was one of the programmers, and he worked long hours
89writing the cleanest code.  He always made the effort to be the best he
90could be, and to make his code the best that it could be.  What resulted
91was quite remarkable. I don't think that money can ever motivate someone
92to work the way he did, he is one of the most selfless men I know.
93
94Yura helps with benchmarking, coding hashes, and block pre-allocation
95code.
96
97Anatoly Pinchuk is a former member of our team who worked closely with
98Vladimir throughout the project's development.  He wrote a quite
99substantial portion of the total code.  He realized that there was a
100space problem with packing tails of files for files larger than a node
101that start on a node aligned boundary (there are reasons to want to node
102align files), and he invented and implemented indirect items and
103unformatted nodes as the solution.
104
105Konstantin Shvachko, with the help of the Russian version of a VC,
106tried to put me in a position where I was forced into giving control
107of the project to him.  (Fortunately, as the person paying the money
108for all salaries from my dayjob I owned all copyrights, and you can't
109really force takeovers of sole proprietorships.)  This was something
110curious, because he never really understood the value of our project,
111why we should do what we do, or why innovation was possible in
112general, but he was sure that he ought to be controlling it.  Every
113innovation had to be forced past him while he was with us.  He added
114two years to the time required to complete reiserfs, and was a net
115loss for me.  Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator who also left
116in a destructive way that erased the value of his contributions, and
117that he was shown much generosity just makes it more painful.
118
119Grigory Zaigralin was an extremely effective system administrator for
120our group.
121
122Igor Krasheninnikov was wonderful at hardware procurement, repair, and
123network installation.
124
125Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote the teahash.c code, and he gives credit to a
126textbook he got the algorithm from in the code.  Note that his analysis
127of how we could use the hashing code in making 32 bit NFS cookies work
128was probably more important than the actual algorithm.  Colin Plumb also
129contributed to it.
130
131Chris Mason dived right into our code, and in just a few months produced
132the journaling code that dramatically increased the value of ReiserFS.
133He is just an amazing programmer.
134
135Igor Zagorovsky is writing much of the new item handler and extent code
136for our next major release.
137
138Alexander Zarochentcev (sometimes known as zam, or sasha), wrote the
139resizer, and is hard at work on implementing allocate on flush.  SGI
140implemented allocate on flush before us for XFS, and generously took
141the time to convince me we should do it also.  They are great people,
142and a great company.
143
144Yuri Shevchuk and Nikita Danilov are doing squid cache optimization.
145
146Vitaly Fertman is doing fsck.
147
148Jeff Mahoney, of SuSE, contributed a few cleanup fixes, most notably
149the endian safe patches which allow ReiserFS to run on any platform
150supported by the Linux kernel.
151
152SuSE, IntegratedLinux.com, Ecila, MP3.com, bigstorage.com, and the
153Alpha PC Company made it possible for me to not have a day job
154anymore, and to dramatically increase our staffing.  Ecila funded
155hypertext feature development, MP3.com funded journaling, SuSE funded
156core development, IntegratedLinux.com funded squid web cache
157appliances, bigstorage.com funded HSM, and the alpha PC company funded
158the alpha port.  Many of these tasks were helped by sponsors other
159than the ones just named.  SuSE has helped in much more than just
160funding....
161
162