On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Ale Terlevich wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Jasper Wallace wrote:
> > 
> > I assume you mean 'drivers' ;-). Linux supports them which means that the
> > information is freely available (due to vairous sillynesses with licences
> > we can't use linux source code and they can't use ours, but we can port
> > information AFAICR). Oh just found a freebsd port of the linux driver:
> 
>  I thought we could use gnu stuff so long as we kept to the gnu licence. 
> I.e. make the source freely available. Does this contradict the BSD 
> licence at all?

The problem (As far as I know - mark or rob are a better authority on this)
is that the netbsd licence says:

do what you want with this code but you *must* acknoledge the author

and the GPL says:

do what you want with this code but you *must* acknoledge the author and you
*must* provide the source code on demand for a `resonoble fee'.

so if you distribute gpl'd stuff under a netbsd licence you break the gpl
whose whole point is to make source code available.

having gpl'd code in the kernel means that they can't distribute the whole
kernel under a BSD style license - which is needed if your some os vendor
who wants to produced a hacked up binary only distribution (for whatever
reason) and not give out source code...

for this reason the netbsd people like to keep gpl'd code out of the kernel.
It's allowed/acepted in the userland stuff beacause we wouldn't have netbsd
without it!

-- 
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