On Feb 18,  1:38pm, Jasper Wallace wrote:
> Subject: RE: (Small) Hardware donation(s)...
> 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

You also can't change the license agreement.

> 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!

Actually, just to clear this issue up, the reason it is allowed in userland is
because individual applications can be entirely GPL'd. The GPL does not *allow*
you to just GPL part of an application (unless you use the library license).
This means that to have any GPL'd code in the kernel you would have to put a
GPL on the entire kernel. This would be a clear violation of the BSD license
(not to mention any non-disclosure agreements covering things like csc.o).

Note that this property of the GPL is why the ARMLinux FPE is supplied as a
kernel loadable module IIRC. Similarly you could probably put GPL'd code in
LKMs under RiscBSD without running into legal problems.

Cheers

Rob