Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 14:19:33 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> To: "Robert V. Baron" <rvb@cs.cmu.edu> Cc: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Coda license term changes ... GPL Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.990108140102.5096A-100000@current1.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <yzs7lux1lyc.fsf@sicily.odyssey.cs.cmu.edu>
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This is truly bad news. It means we maybe can't use CODA in our products at whistle. GPL has a clause that says "If you modify this you must let us have the changes.." this is good. It also says "and the sources to everythign you link with it ans the entire aggregation becomes GPL'd" At least this is my reading.. stand by for a flamefest julian On 8 Jan 1999, Robert V. Baron wrote: > > The first piece of mail below was posted to coda-announce earlier in > the week. The netbsd folk (on developers) have been having mixed > feeling over it. A clarification was posted to (developers) which is > also included below. I was wondering how the FreeBSD folk felt. > Note: a number of people have taken offense over the OSS usage in > the first post. This is clarified in the second post. > > ================================================================ > To: coda-announce@TELEMANN.coda.cs.cmu.edu, > Coda Discussion <linux-coda@TELEMANN.coda.cs.cmu.edu> > > Happy 1999! > > I have just uploaded the first 5.0 pre release. > > There are many differences with 4.6: > - an entirely new directory system which removes a really nasty bug that > plagued the servers for years. > > - many improvements to the networking code, in particular, much more > stable computations of bandwidth and retransmission times. > > - Coda is now GPL'd - primarily because we want to indicate that we are > really an OSS project. OSS != GPL.. what about PERL? > > This is a good moment for maintainers of Debian, Sparc Linux and other > platforms to jump forward. > > We will smooth out some remaining bugs during the next few weeks. We will > come out with a Windows 95 client next week and an NT server soon, as well > as with the NetBSD/FreeBSD releases. Windows 95 is hard to build right > now (wait until next week) or read the coda-HOWTO, for BSD you should be > ok. > > A couple of other points: > > - a new Coda HOWTO was written. Have a look at: > http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/coda-howto.html > source in > ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/doc/coda-howto.sgml > > - We have a bugs list (Jitterbug): please read them and fix them! > > - I have made a list of some projects that are falling between the cracks > here. > http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/todo.html > > > Have fun, let us know what is good (and bad). > > - Peter - > ================================================================= > Let me try clarify the dicussions about Coda and its recent adoption > of the GPL. > > 1. HISTORY > > First, I have been a BSD follower since 4.2BSD. I worked on the > porting of Mach to various platforms. Perhaps most signficantly I did > the Mach i386 distribution and supported the Mach 2.5 kernel and later > Mach 3.0 kernel. I have most recently worked on kernel support for > Coda on x86 for NetBSD and FreeBSD, though the original code was > written by others. > > I am low on the Coda organizational totem pole. Peter Braam (who made > the original post) is a senior systems scientist who leads Coda > development. He reports to the Coda PI, Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya > for short). Satya is responsible for making the GPL decision and did > so only after careful thought. He has advised many students whose > theses make up Coda. Numerous people (~20) have worked on Coda in the > past. > > When Coda was proposed to be included in the NetBSD & FreeBSD systems > and allowed in, there was no plan at that time that to GPL Coda. So I > was acting in good faith. Satya made the decision to GPL Coda only in > December 1998. > > 2. RATIONALE FOR DECISION > > Satya has pondered how Coda will survive when contract funding for it > ceases. He also has considered who, if anyone, should profit from it > when all the people who contributed to it at the university have > graduated and gone their separate ways. Next, there is the issue of > Coda source fragmentation. Satya believes that GPL is more likely to > ensure that Coda remains coherent, preserving a single copy of Coda > with the same API for every user/builder/supporter. Finally, Satya > also believes that GPL reassures potential contributors that their > work will forever remain publicly available, and not become the > captive of some company that derives sole benefit from it. These were > the reasons for his deciding to GPL Coda. You could add a clause that explicitly restricts the licence from requiring release of OTHER parts of the system. Otherwise how can people sign NDAs to write drivers etc.? > > Note that components of Coda that have independent use (typically > libraries such as RVM and RPC2) are under the less restrictive LGPL. > Most importantly, KERNEL CODE IN NetBSD AND FreeBSD IS NOT GPL'ED. > They preserve the original copyright from CMU under which they were > integrated into NetBSD and FreeBSD. We have no plans to change this. > However, if it will make the NetBSD and FreeBSD communities more > comfortable, WE ARE WILLING TO TRANSFER OWNERSHIP OF THIS CODE TO > THEM. > > 3. WHERE TO GO FROM HERE > > Let's let the dicussions proceed for a while and I will wait for an > answer from core. I think that GPL is a fact of life. Our > compilation tools are GPL'ed, visit /usr/src/gnu. I don't accept that > we have a system without the comp tools. Further, I would find it > difficult to survive w/o some flavor of emacs which is GPL/ed, etc ... > I don't think that it should matter that the Coda application code is > GPL'ed. > > In a past discussion, it was maintained that if Coda was in the kernel > it should be in the source tree. It was resolved that it was > unfeasable to split Coda apart and populate the source tree with the > directories and still maintain synchronization with Coda development. > Perry suggested that Coda be maintained in a shadow tree like gnu is. > This was defered for a while because we were not ready. Perry's plan > is sensible and I will follow up on it if Coda remains part of NetBSD > and FreeBSD. > > Finally, you could just yank Coda out of the kernel and make it an lkm > only. This would make life more difficult for me, since lkms are > currently difficult to debug in NetBSD. However, I am willing to do > this if that's the preferred outcome. > This is probably not needed if the kernel parts are not GPL. We do even have a few optional GPL kernel modules. I'm more worried about what companies like Whistle need to do to use CODA in an empbedded application like ours. (Not that we are at the moment but it could be an item in the future. julian http://www.whistle.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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