From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 4 15:46:25 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from rhymer.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (rhymer.cogsci.ed.ac.uk [129.215.144.8]) by builder.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DF3AA4356 for ; Fri, 4 Feb 2000 15:46:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (richard@burns144 [129.215.144.4]) by rhymer.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA00526; Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:46:38 GMT Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:46:37 GMT Message-Id: <12758.200002042346@burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> From: Richard Tobin Subject: Re: GNU components of BSD To: Jonathon McKitrick , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: Jonathon McKitrick's message of Fri, 4 Feb 2000 21:31:56 +0000 (GMT) Organization: just say no Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > If the FreeBSD distro includes GNU components, how can someone > repackage and resell FreeBSD like the BSD license allows? I think (and no doubt I will be rapidly corrected if wrong) that the inclusion of GNU code in BSD counts as "mere aggregation" (search for this phrase in the GPL). For example, you could perfectly well distribute BSD without gcc (and with rather more work, substitute an alternative compiler). There are GNU components for the kernel, but they are not linked in by default for just this reason; and their sources are in a separate directory (/sys/gnu). Someone who distributed a binary-only version of FreeBSD would have to keep these parts separate and distribute them with source. So long as you make sure that you do not create a "derived work" of a GPLed program, you can distribute it with a non-GPLed program. -- Richard To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message