From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 2 17:20:52 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from lists.blarg.net (lists.blarg.net [206.124.128.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55B3D37B416 for ; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 17:20:49 -0800 (PST) Received: from thig.blarg.net (thig.blarg.net [206.124.128.18]) by lists.blarg.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id DF9F2BD9D; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 17:20:48 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost.localdomain ([206.124.139.115]) by thig.blarg.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA14393; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 17:20:47 -0800 Received: (from jojo@localhost) by localhost.localdomain (8.11.6/8.11.3) id g031LtM37774; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 17:21:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from swear@blarg.net) To: "stark" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Licensing Question References: <20020102185250.98935.qmail@purpledreams.com> From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Date: 02 Jan 2002 17:21:55 -0800 In-Reply-To: <20020102185250.98935.qmail@purpledreams.com> Message-ID: <6k666kb558.66k@localhost.localdomain> Lines: 34 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "stark" 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"? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message