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Date:      Mon, 18 Mar 2002 19:36:13 +1030
From:      Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>
Cc:        hiten@uk.FreeBSD.org, Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>, Josh MacDonald <jmacd@CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Parity Error <bootup@mail.ru>, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG, reiserfs-dev@namesys.com
Subject:   Licensing issues, round 4711 (was: [reiserfs-dev] Re: metadata update durability ordering/soft updates)
Message-ID:  <20020318193613.V93909@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <3C95ACBA.4040108@namesys.com>
References:  <20020317225759.82774.qmail@web21109.mail.yahoo.com> <3C95ACBA.4040108@namesys.com>

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On Monday, 18 March 2002 at 12:00:42 +0300, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Hiten Pandya wrote:
>
>> --- Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> wrote:
>>
>>> because it is a lot of work....
>>>
>>
>> [ ... ]
>>
>>> If you can pay someone else for proprietary enhancements to FreeBSD, you
>>> can pay me too....  this is the principle behind offering both GPL'd and
>>> fee based licenses of reiserfs.
>>
>> So, putting it in a nutshell, and hopefully closing this topic, we cannot
>> port ReiserFS for free, right..? :|  So for SuSE linux users, it would be
>> one helluva task to switch to FreeBSD if they ever even wanted to.
>
> You can port it for free if you port it to a GPL'd OS (or port the OS to
> the GPL).

We've been through this one just recently with JFS.  We can use
reiserfs in FreeBSD with only a few restrictions.  Terry mentioned
some of them, but in case you, like myself, find that too detailled,
here's the bottom line: you can include GPL code in a FreeBSD kernel,
but you can't include proprietary code in the same kernel binary.
Well, you can, as long as you're prepared to supply the source of that
proprietary code for "free".  Contrary to what Terry says, we could
even distribute a CD containing a binary kernel with GPL code in it.

This by no means suggests that the FreeBSD project thinks this is a
good idea.

Greg
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