Purpose of _Copyright_Notice?

[Sebastian Huber]

Hello,

there is a constant _Copyright_Notice declared in <rtems/system.h> and 
defined in exinit.c:

const char _Copyright_Notice[] =
"COPYRIGHT (c) 1989-2008.\n\
On-Line Applications Research Corporation (OAR).\n";

This copyright notice is out of date and incomplete. Since it is not 
referenced by the system, it is also garbage collected by the linker. 
There is no API to access this constant.

If we want to keep this constant, then we should add an API for it, add 
it to a linker set which is not garbage collected, and bring the notice 
up to date. I am in favor of removing it completely. The BSD license 
mandates only that the copyright notice must be reproduced in 
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution:

"2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

There is no obligation to reproduce copyright notices in the binary.

For GPL software the copyright in a binary is also not necessary. It is 
simply not enough, you have to provide the sources of the binary.