ZyXEL Communications WAP5605 User Manual page 189

The set of programs and documentation known as "lmbench" are distributed under the Free
Software Foundation's General Public License with the following additional restrictions (which
override any conflicting restrictions in the GPL):
1. You may not distribute results in any public forum, in any publication, or in any other way if you
have modified the benchmarks.
2. You may not distribute the results for a fee of any kind. This includes web sites which generate
revenue from advertising.
If you have modifications or enhancements that you wish included in future versions, please mail
those to me, Larry McVoy, at lm@bitmover.com.
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Rationale for the publication restrictions:
In summary:
a) LMbench is designed to measure enough of an OS that if you do well in all catagories, you've
covered latency and bandwidth in networking, disks, file systems, VM systems, and memory
systems.
b) Multiple times in the past people have wanted to report partial results. Without exception,
they were doing so to show a skewed view of whatever it was they were measuring (for example,
one OS fit small processes into segments and used the segment register to switch them, getting
good results, but did not want to report large process context switches because those didn't look as
good).
c) We insist that if you formally report LMbench results, you have to report all of them and make
the raw results file easily available. Reporting all of them means in that same publication, a pointer
does not count. Formally, in this context, means in a paper, on a web site, etc., but does not mean
the exchange of results between OS developers who are tuning a particular subsystem.
We have a lot of history with benchmarking and feel strongly that there is little to be gained and a
lot to be lost if we allowed the results to be published in isolation, without the complete story being
told.
WAP5605 User's Guide
Appendix F Open Software Announcements
189