3 ReiserFS is hereby licensed under the GNU General
4 Public License version 2.
6 Source code files that contain the phrase "licensing governed by
7 reiserfs/README" are "governed files" throughout this file. Governed
8 files are licensed under the GPL. The portions of them owned by Hans
9 Reiser, or authorized to be licensed by him, have been in the past,
10 and likely will be in the future, licensed to other parties under
11 other licenses. If you add your code to governed files, and don't
12 want it to be owned by Hans Reiser, put your copyright label on that
13 code so the poor blight and his customers can keep things straight.
14 All portions of governed files not labeled otherwise are owned by Hans
15 Reiser, and by adding your code to it, widely distributing it to
16 others or sending us a patch, and leaving the sentence in stating that
17 licensing is governed by the statement in this file, you accept this.
18 It will be a kindness if you identify whether Hans Reiser is allowed
19 to license code labeled as owned by you on your behalf other than
20 under the GPL, because he wants to know if it is okay to do so and put
21 a check in the mail to you (for non-trivial improvements) when he
22 makes his next sale. He makes no guarantees as to the amount if any,
23 though he feels motivated to motivate contributors, and you can surely
24 discuss this with him before or after contributing. You have the
25 right to decline to allow him to license your code contribution other
28 Further licensing options are available for commercial and/or other
29 interests directly from Hans Reiser: hans@reiser.to. If you interpret
30 the GPL as not allowing those additional licensing options, you read
31 it wrongly, and Richard Stallman agrees with me, when carefully read
32 you can see that those restrictions on additional terms do not apply
33 to the owner of the copyright, and my interpretation of this shall
34 govern for this license.
36 Finally, nothing in this license shall be interpreted to allow you to
37 fail to fairly credit me, or to remove my credits, without my
38 permission, unless you are an end user not redistributing to others.
39 If you have doubts about how to properly do that, or about what is
40 fair, ask. (Last I spoke with him Richard was contemplating how best
41 to address the fair crediting issue in the next GPL version.)
45 Reiserfs is a file system based on balanced tree algorithms, which is
46 described at http://devlinux.com/namesys.
48 Stop reading here. Go there, then return.
50 Send bug reports to yura@namesys.botik.ru.
52 mkreiserfs and other utilities are in reiserfs/utils, or wherever your
53 Linux provider put them. There is some disagreement about how useful
54 it is for users to get their fsck and mkreiserfs out of sync with the
55 version of reiserfs that is in their kernel, with many important
56 distributors wanting them out of sync.:-) Please try to remember to
57 recompile and reinstall fsck and mkreiserfs with every update of
58 reiserfs, this is a common source of confusion. Note that some of the
59 utilities cannot be compiled without accessing the balancing code
60 which is in the kernel code, and relocating the utilities may require
61 you to specify where that code can be found.
63 Yes, if you update your reiserfs kernel module you do have to
64 recompile your kernel, most of the time. The errors you get will be
65 quite cryptic if your forget to do so.
67 Real users, as opposed to folks who want to hack and then understand
68 what went wrong, will want REISERFS_CHECK off.
70 Hideous Commercial Pitch: Spread your development costs across other OS
71 vendors. Select from the best in the world, not the best in your
72 building, by buying from third party OS component suppliers. Leverage
73 the software component development power of the internet. Be the most
74 aggressive in taking advantage of the commercial possibilities of
75 decentralized internet development, and add value through your branded
76 integration that you sell as an operating system. Let your competitors
77 be the ones to compete against the entire internet by themselves. Be
78 hip, get with the new economic trend, before your competitors do. Send
79 email to hans@reiser.to.
81 To understand the code, after reading the website, start reading the
82 code by reading reiserfs_fs.h first.
84 Hans Reiser was the project initiator, primary architect, source of all
85 funding for the first 5.5 years, and one of the programmers. He owns
88 Vladimir Saveljev was one of the programmers, and he worked long hours
89 writing the cleanest code. He always made the effort to be the best he
90 could be, and to make his code the best that it could be. What resulted
91 was quite remarkable. I don't think that money can ever motivate someone
92 to work the way he did, he is one of the most selfless men I know.
94 Yura helps with benchmarking, coding hashes, and block pre-allocation
97 Anatoly Pinchuk is a former member of our team who worked closely with
98 Vladimir throughout the project's development. He wrote a quite
99 substantial portion of the total code. He realized that there was a
100 space problem with packing tails of files for files larger than a node
101 that start on a node aligned boundary (there are reasons to want to node
102 align files), and he invented and implemented indirect items and
103 unformatted nodes as the solution.
105 Konstantin Shvachko, with the help of the Russian version of a VC,
106 tried to put me in a position where I was forced into giving control
107 of the project to him. (Fortunately, as the person paying the money
108 for all salaries from my dayjob I owned all copyrights, and you can't
109 really force takeovers of sole proprietorships.) This was something
110 curious, because he never really understood the value of our project,
111 why we should do what we do, or why innovation was possible in
112 general, but he was sure that he ought to be controlling it. Every
113 innovation had to be forced past him while he was with us. He added
114 two years to the time required to complete reiserfs, and was a net
115 loss for me. Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator who also left
116 in a destructive way that erased the value of his contributions, and
117 that he was shown much generosity just makes it more painful.
119 Grigory Zaigralin was an extremely effective system administrator for
122 Igor Krasheninnikov was wonderful at hardware procurement, repair, and
123 network installation.
125 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote the teahash.c code, and he gives credit to a
126 textbook he got the algorithm from in the code. Note that his analysis
127 of how we could use the hashing code in making 32 bit NFS cookies work
128 was probably more important than the actual algorithm. Colin Plumb also
131 Chris Mason dived right into our code, and in just a few months produced
132 the journaling code that dramatically increased the value of ReiserFS.
133 He is just an amazing programmer.
135 Igor Zagorovsky is writing much of the new item handler and extent code
136 for our next major release.
138 Alexander Zarochentcev (sometimes known as zam, or sasha), wrote the
139 resizer, and is hard at work on implementing allocate on flush. SGI
140 implemented allocate on flush before us for XFS, and generously took
141 the time to convince me we should do it also. They are great people,
144 Yuri Shevchuk and Nikita Danilov are doing squid cache optimization.
146 Vitaly Fertman is doing fsck.
148 Jeff Mahoney, of SuSE, contributed a few cleanup fixes, most notably
149 the endian safe patches which allow ReiserFS to run on any platform
150 supported by the Linux kernel.
152 SuSE, IntegratedLinux.com, Ecila, MP3.com, bigstorage.com, and the
153 Alpha PC Company made it possible for me to not have a day job
154 anymore, and to dramatically increase our staffing. Ecila funded
155 hypertext feature development, MP3.com funded journaling, SuSE funded
156 core development, IntegratedLinux.com funded squid web cache
157 appliances, bigstorage.com funded HSM, and the alpha PC company funded
158 the alpha port. Many of these tasks were helped by sponsors other
159 than the ones just named. SuSE has helped in much more than just
projects / linux-2.6 / blob