BSD License????

W. Wayne Liauh LiauhW001 at Hawaii.rr.com
Sat Sep 8 21:01:33 PDT 2001


I guess I am more used to dealing with a different world than those of free
software advocates and thus failed to see the obvious.  Shame on me!  Most of
the entities I know develop their kernal patches for in-house use only and no
intention whatsoever to re-distribute them.

On the legal front,  since the advertising clause in the license appearing on
BSD Unix files has been officially rescinded, porting a BSD kernel to Linux
should not pose any problem.  The reverse, of course, is not true.  GPL is
much stricter than FreeBSD.

OTOH, since the GPL has never been litigated, it is very difficult to say
what its terms exactly entail (other than being aided by the FAQ that
accompanies the GPL).  For example, what does an "organization" mean?  Can it
mean an open-ended organization (i.e., anyone who wants to use your software
must pay a due to join your organization thus, to a limited extent, bypassing
the GPL requirement).

This discussion also brings out an interesting issue, that is, it appears to
be more difficult to port an open-sourced program into Linux than to port a
proprietary one.  With the latter, what you're doing is to reverse-engineer
the functions of the code.  Whereas, with an open-sourced program, it will be
very difficult to argue that you are not translating (a form of copying) the
code to a different form, even though you may be rewriting the entire code.

On Saturday 08 September 2001 16:33, you wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jimen Ching" <jching at flex.com>
> To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
> Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 4:12 PM
> Subject: [luau] Re: BSD License????
>
> > On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
> > >And based on what Dusty wrote, he is only interested in porting PF into
> > >Linux.  As long as he does not "publicly" distribute it, there cannot be
>
> any
>
> > >GPL violation because he has not come to that bridge.
> >
> > I have not heard of anyone who worked on free software with the explicit
> > intent of NOT re-distributing it.  What would be the point?
> >
> > --jc
> > --
> > Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org
>
> One of the provisions of OSI approved licensing is that you are allowed to
> modify software and not release changes, only if it is for personal use or
> use within the organization.  If you are under a license like the GPL, if
> you release any of these changes in the form of binaries, you are then
> required to also release source code if asked.
>
> But yes, it would take hundreds of coding hours to make such changes, and
> all that would be wasted if it was done not to be distributed and shared
> for others.  This is one of the drawbacks of incompatible open source
> licensing, differing in the definition of "Free".
>
>
>
>
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