On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 10:19:23 +0200 (MEST)
"Oliver Korpilla" <Oliver.Korpilla@gmx.de> wrote:

> My real issue is really: Is it okay, from an ethical and legal standpoint,
> to look at Linux scheduler code for inspiration for NetBSD scheduler code,
> especially if this would not be the only inspiration? If you additionally
> read papers, excerpts from books, and FreeBSD's SCHED_ULE? 

Of course, provided you release your code under BSD license, and that
you know it's your code, untainted :).  If there's FreeBSD code, it's
not a problem as long as you also add the relevant license and copyright
sections as-is, along with your own if you did modifications).  Ideas and
concepts are not code (as someone mentionned, a process can be patented,
but that's really another story).

> And, if you'd try to implement something similar and explicitly state it
> embodies some principles embodied in Linux code or reference it with a
> credit in the code, would that be accessible to the NetBSD community???

It is common for NetBSD to borrow nice ideas from other systems, such as
SunOS, (i.e. kernel module loading API and kvm(3)), of course they were
re-implemented however, it was done to maintain a similar API to that of
another popular operating system for convenience in this case.  So why
not

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