Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 07:16:20 -0600 From: "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011273381.a7e99e@mired.org> To: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen), Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org>, stark@jeamland.ca Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Licensing Question Message-ID: <15424.14116.569951.344189@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <70578038@toto.iv>
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Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> types: > On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 01:52:50PM -0500, stark stood up and spoke: > > OK, I've looked through /usr/src/sys and I've tried to get my > > head around this, but I'm still confused : > > > > What, exactly, are the licensing restrictions WRT the 'normal' > > (i.e. non-ports, non-packages) distribution of FreeBSD? > > > > If I'm reading the 'README' and 'COPYRIGHT' files correctly > > in /usr/src, then the BSD license (without the advertising clause) > > applies to all of the directories EXCEPT the /usr/src/gnu directory, > > which contains other packages, mostly GPL or LGPL licensed. > > > > Is this correct? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? > > Nope, except if otherwise noted, all files that form the FreeBSD based > system are licensed under the BSD license, as found under /COPYRIGHT. In > order to make things easier, the parts of the system that are licensed > under the GPL or LGPL have been put into the "gnu" subdirectory. > > So, the assumptions you made above are correct. I'm not positive that's the case. In particular, there are things in /usr/src/contrib that aren't covered by the BSD license - though all the ones I checked have very similar terms, or also appear in /usr/src/gnu and are GPLed. The latter means that something being in /usr/src/contrib is not evidence that it is covered by a BSD-like license. :-( Gary W. Swearingen <swear@blarg.net> types: > P.S. Another question with an even more problematical answer is: who > are the copyright owners? Who owns something that is copyrighted in > 1993 but has been continually modified by many ever since? The original copyright owners, plus anyone who has contributed changes to the project. That includes not only commiters, but people who submit PR's with patches that are included substantially as is. All of which is why Xemacs isn't GNU Emacs - no one wanted to do the work of identifying everyone who contributed code to the project, chasing them down and getting their permission to distribute it under the GPL. Since it can't be GPL'ed, it can't be the GNU editor, so we live with both of them. > And who is "The FreeBSD Project" or "The FreeBSD Documentation > Project"? The former has been discussed before, and I believe there is a legal entity behind that name. I'm not sure that is true of the latter. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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