On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Peter Seebach wrote:

> In message <Pine.NEB.4.10.10002202139460.312-100000@corwin.home>, Frederick Bru
> ckman writes:
> >> db2 is available under special license terms called the "sleepycat" license,
> >> the idea of which is to encourage people like Netscape to spend $many on a
> >> license to distribute it without source - but this won't work for NetBSD.
> 
> >I read that license as "GPL or better", that is, you can take it as
> >GPL and provide source, or you can pay to keep your sources secret.
> >For our purposes, we can treat it as GPL.
> 
> For the curious, this is because otherwise it becomes much harder for people
> to take a NetBSD system, do work on it, and not give out the source to the
> resulting system; one of the goals of the NetBSD project is to provide a
> maximally-reusable source tree.

Lest I be misunderstood, I'm not arguing for db2 and vim to be pulled
into the base sources. I'm just saying that the oddly worded sleepycat
license is, in fact, no more restrictive than the GPL, so we can
continue to distribute binaries and source on the CD's (in pkgsrc!).