Date: 02 Jan 2002 17:21:55 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "stark" <stark@jeamland.ca> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Licensing Question Message-ID: <6k666kb558.66k@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20020102185250.98935.qmail@purpledreams.com> References: <20020102185250.98935.qmail@purpledreams.com>
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"stark" <stark@jeamland.ca> writes:
> What, exactly, are the licensing restrictions WRT the 'normal'
> (i.e. non-ports, non-packages) distribution of FreeBSD?
That's a good question. I wish there was a good answer.
/COPYRIGHT limits itself thusly, it seems to me:
All of the documentation and software included in the 4.4BSD and
4.4BSD-Lite Releases is copyrighted by The Regents of the University
of California.
Determinging what parts of FreeBSD are still derivatives of 4.4BSD*
would be a big job and probably a subject of debate.
I suspect that most of the source code offers that license and other
BSD-like licenses. I've seen 2-, 3-, and 4-clause one, but if I
remember a recent -chat thread correctly, there is some code which
is under other licenses which don't seem to cause any more problems than
a BSDL. I suppose that they are appropriately marked, but you'll have
to do a search for them if you're interested, maybe asking a more
specific question for help on finding them.
Some of the code (eg, /usr/43src/sys/i386/ibcs2/ibcs2_misc.c) is
copyrighted and 4-clause-licensed by people who have apparently not
disowned the evil 4th clause (some not even based on Berkely code).
Why do you care?
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? And who is
"The FreeBSD Project" or "The FreeBSD Documentation Project"?
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