[LICENSING]

Reiser4 is hereby licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Source code files that contain the phrase "licensing governed by reiser4/README" are "governed files" throughout this file. Governed files are licensed under the GPL. The portions of them owned by Hans Reiser, or authorized to be licensed by him, have been in the past, and likely will be in the future, licensed to other parties under other licenses. If you add your code to governed files, and don't want it to be owned by Hans Reiser, put your copyright label on that code so the poor blight and his customers can keep things straight. All portions of governed files not labeled otherwise are owned by Hans Reiser, and by adding your code to it, widely distributing it to others or sending us a patch, and leaving the sentence in stating that licensing is governed by the statement in this file, you accept this. It will be a kindness if you identify whether Hans Reiser is allowed to license code labeled as owned by you on your behalf other than under the GPL, because he wants to know if it is okay to do so and put a check in the mail to you (for non-trivial improvements) when he makes his next sale. He makes no guarantees as to the amount if any, though he feels motivated to motivate contributors, and you can surely discuss this with him before or after contributing. You have the right to decline to allow him to license your code contribution other than under the GPL.

Further licensing options are available for commercial and/or other interests directly from Hans Reiser: reiser@namesys.com. If you interpret the GPL as not allowing those additional licensing options, you read it wrongly, and Richard Stallman agrees with me, when carefully read you can see that those restrictions on additional terms do not apply to the owner of the copyright, and my interpretation of this shall govern for this license.

[END LICENSING]

Reiser4 is a file system based on dancing tree algorithms, and is described at http://www.namesys.com

mkfs.reiser4 and other utilities are on our webpage or wherever your Linux provider put them. You really want to be running the latest version off the website if you use fsck.

Yes, if you update your reiser4 kernel module you do have to recompile your kernel, most of the time. The errors you get will be quite cryptic if your forget to do so.

Hideous Commercial Pitch: Spread your development costs across other OS vendors. Select from the best in the world, not the best in your building, by buying from third party OS component suppliers. Leverage the software component development power of the internet. Be the most aggressive in taking advantage of the commercial possibilities of decentralized internet development, and add value through your branded integration that you sell as an operating system. Let your competitors be the ones to compete against the entire internet by themselves. Be hip, get with the new economic trend, before your competitors do. Send email to reiser@namesys.com

Hans Reiser was the primary architect of Reiser4, but a whole team chipped their ideas in. He invested everything he had into Namesys for 5.5 dark years of no money before Reiser3 finally started to work well enough to bring in money. He owns the copyright.

DARPA was the primary sponsor of Reiser4. DARPA does not endorse Reiser4, it merely sponsors it. DARPA is, in solely Hans's personal opinion, unique in its willingness to invest into things more theoretical than the VC community can readily understand, and more longterm than allows them to be sure that they will be the ones to extract the economic benefits from. DARPA also integrated us into a security community that transformed our security worldview.

Vladimir Saveliev is our lead programmer, with us from the beginning, and he worked long hours writing the cleanest code. This is why he is now the lead programmer after years of commitment to our work. He always made the effort to be the best he could be, and to make his code the best that it could be. What resulted was quite remarkable. I don't think that money can ever motivate someone to work the way he did, he is one of the most selfless men I know.

Alexander Lyamin was our sysadmin, and helped to educate us in security issues. Moscow State University and IMT were very generous in the internet access they provided us, and in lots of other little ways that a generous institution can be.

Alexander Zarochentcev (sometimes known as zam, or sasha), wrote the locking code, the block allocator, and finished the flushing code. His code is always crystal clean and well structured.

Nikita Danilov wrote the core of the balancing code, the core of the plugins code, and the directory code. He worked a steady pace of long hours that produced a whole lot of well abstracted code. He is our senior computer scientist.

Vladimir Demidov wrote the parser. Writing an in kernel parser is something very few persons have the skills for, and it is thanks to him that we can say that the parser is really not so big compared to various bits of our other code, and making a parser work in the kernel was not so complicated as everyone would imagine mainly because it was him doing it...

Joshua McDonald wrote the transaction manager, and the flush code. The flush code unexpectedly turned out be extremely hairy for reasons you can read about on our web page, and he did a great job on an extremely difficult task.

Nina Reiser handled our accounting, government relations, and much more.

Ramon Reiser developed our website.

Beverly Palmer drew our graphics.

Vitaly Fertman developed librepair, userspace plugins repair code, fsck and worked with Umka on developing libreiser4 and userspace plugins.

Yury Umanets (aka Umka) developed libreiser4, userspace plugins and userspace tools (reiser4progs).

Oleg Drokin (aka Green) is the release manager who fixes everything. It is so nice to have someone like that on the team. He (plus Chris and Jeff) make it possible for the entire rest of the Namesys team to focus on Reiser4, and he fixed a whole lot of Reiser4 bugs also. It is just amazing to watch his talent for spotting bugs in action.

Edward Shishkin wrote cryptcompress file plugin (which manages files built of encrypted and(or) compressed bodies) and other plugins related to transparent encryption and compression support.