From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jan 23 10:04:52 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA06682 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 10:04:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from feisal.newera.ab.ca (feisal.newera.ab.ca [198.161.82.137]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA06676 for ; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 10:04:46 -0800 (PST) Received: by feisal.newera.ab.ca (1.39.111.2/16.2) id AA035110083; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 11:01:23 -0700 Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 11:01:22 -0700 (MST) From: Stephen Mathezer To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Licensing and liability issues for commercial development Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I'm just curious about how people out there deal with licensing and liability issues when producing software for FreeBSD. We produce backup software for many platforms and as such we need to be concerned about what happens if something breaks. Licensing with gcc is also a question. What if we write software to back up a FreeBSD machine and it gets lost due to a FreeBSD bug? How can we cover our butts in this situation? The Gcc license stipulates that for software compiled with gcc, object must be made freely available. We don't really want to do that. Plus, what happens if gcc tightens the license further? Basically I'm just curious as to how people out there handle these issues because we are getting more and more requests to support the free Unices and are currently refusing them all because of the above concerns. This is a shame because we use our product in house on FreeBSD machines and I personally am a fan and run FreeBSD at home but we can't see a way to support it commercially. I know we can purchase Motif for FreeBSD. Is there also a commercially available compiler without the licensing restraints of gcc? Thanks for any thoughts -Steve