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Date:      Sat, 5 Oct 2002 09:06:30 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: grub boot loader or freebsd boot loader
Message-ID:  <200210050706.g9576Uol091583@lurza.secnetix.de>
In-Reply-To: <wh65wha5pg.5wh@localhost.localdomain>

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Gary W. Swearingen <swear@attbi.com> wrote:
 > I would like to see people support and develop the FreeBSD boot loader
 > or some other loader with a decent license.
 > 
 > The combination of the GPL'd GRUB (or GAG) boot loader and the kernel is
 > too likely to be considerd by some judge or jury as a derivative of both
 > parts which is sufficiently unworthy of any of the GPL's nebulous excape
 > clauses to avoid partial or even total infection.  (Especially when a
 > dangerously-dedicated-disk install is considered.)

Why would you want to install a bootmanager on a dangerously-
dedicated disk?  Apart from that, dangerously-dedicated has
been deprecated, AFAIK.

The kernel can certainly not be considered a derivative of
any bootloader; they don't have anything in common, neither
do they share any code.  Remember that you can boot FreeBSD
from the NT boot loader, for example, which isn't even open
source and certainly has a more restrictive license than
GRUB.  (Microsoft certainly didn't have supporting Linux or
BSD in mind when they created their boot loader, while
FreeBSD is even mentioned in the GRUB documentation, IIRC).

I'd be much more concerned about other GPL'ed parts of the
base system.

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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