BSD License????

[W. Wayne Liauh]

Just realized that your question was about porting an "OpenBSD" PF, and 
not a "FreeBSD" PF, into Linux.  As such, my answer to your hypothetical 
question does NOT apply to your actual question.

One of the biggest problems with the BSD license is that the copyright 
holder can add restrictions to the standard FreeBSD license.  I don't 
think the OpenBSD license allows you to re-distribute any portion of the 
code without their explicit permission.

Thus, I believe, unless your license says otherwise, you can NOT legally 
port the OpenBSD PF to Linux.

On a side note, remember Microsoft has contracted Corel to port dotNET 
to FreeBSD?  I believe Microsoft will impose a different license which 
will prohibit the re-distribution of any portion of their code.  In 
fact, Microsoft may keep their dotNET BSD code proprietary.


Dusty wrote:

>There has been alot of discussion about this since I posted my question, but I have yet to recieve a good answer.
>
>My question was "would it be legal for me to port OpenBSD PacketFilter to Linux?"
>
>Maybe it will be easier if I restate the question in hypothetical.  If I wrote the worlds greatest calculator "DustyCalc" and licensed it under the BSD license, could Warren legally port (make all the code changes required to get it working) it to Linux and license his calculator "WarrenCalc" as GPL?
>
>Dusty
>
>
>>No, you have to worry about all the various open-source licenses (and 
>>there are a whole bunch of them), only when you are interested in 
>>building a commercial entity to re-distribute their code.  Steve Ballmer 
>>is spreading FUD about open-source licenses, particularly GPL; and it 
>>appears to be working even among those like yourself whom I consider 
>>experts in the open-source community.
>>
>>There are two key elements in GPL and Free/Open BSD: a copyright notice 
>>and a bold-typed disclaimer of warranty that will free all contributors 
>>from any potential liability.  (You can provide your own warrenty with 
>>whatever terms and charge whatever price your buyer is willing to pay.) 
>> With GPL'ed code, of course, if you re-distribute the code you also 
>>have to "offer to provide the source code" at cost.  As we all know, 
>>most GUN's libraries are under LGPL, and as such, you can include their 
>>binaries without providing your source code.  
>>
>>
>>Jimen Ching wrote:
>>
>>>On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
>>>
>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>Yes, these issues are some of the things people are complaining about in
>>>the free/open source software world.  Of course, these problems only arise
>>>when you try to combine the source code.  Most projects I know are always
>>>re-inventing the wheel anyway.  So these issues are kind of moot.  BSD has
>>>their PF, Linux will get their own in time.  It is unfortunate that the
>>>license is the major driver of these re-inventions.  But there are more
>>>than enough engineers to do the work, so why worry?
>>>
>>>Even if there are no licenses to drive these duplicate efforts, someone
>>>will always want to do it anyway.  Look at the number of editors and
>>>browsers and Wordprocessors and desktop environments.
>>>
>>>--jc
>>>--
>>>Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
>"Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for 
>people that love unix."
>
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