BSD License????

[Jimen Ching]

On 7 Sep 2001, Dusty wrote:
>So would it be legal for someone to port the OpenBSD teams PF (packet
>filter), which uses the BSD license, to be used in Linux.  I am just
>asking about legally, nothing about the technical challenges in making a
>BSD kernel module work as a Linux kernel module.  I assume this would
>mean foking the PF code into two seperate open source projects.

Unfortunately, you can not separate technical and legal issues.  If this
packet filter can be made into a loadable module, then there is no
problems.  Linus says the loadable module API is a public API, so a
loadable module is no different from an application that happens to run in
kernel mode.

If this is not possible, then it depends on whether the BSD license that
PF uses contain the advertisement clause.  If it does, then it is
incompatible with the GPL and you can not distribute the ported source
code even if you got it working.  Some software explicitly excluded the
advertisement clause from the BSD license.

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org