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

[BALATON Zoltan]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2016, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 11/02/16 07:51, Alyssa Milburn wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 06, 2016 at 10:40:10AM +0000, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
>>>> This means it is available in the guest OSes too (e.g. in the devicetree
>>>> under /sys on Linux), which I hope is OK.
>>>
>>> Does adding a call to delete-fake-copyright in ciface_quiesce() as found
>>> in arch/ppc/qemu/methods.c help here?
>>
>> Not in Finnix, at least. Judging by the messages at bootup, the device-tree
>> is constructed before calling quiesce. I think this is kind of unavoidable
>> though.
>>
>> I would change 'fake copyright notice' to 'fake copyright property' in the
>> comments (both in go() and in qemu.fs), but anyway this seems good to me.
>
> Great, thanks for the review! If there are no further comments, I'll
> commit this tomorrow.

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?)

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan