Date: 08 Jan 1999 16:41:47 -0500 From: "Robert V. Baron" <rvb@cs.cmu.edu> To: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Coda license term changes ... GPL Message-ID: <yzs7lux1lyc.fsf@sicily.odyssey.cs.cmu.edu>
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The first piece of mail below was posted to coda-announce earlier in
the week. The netbsd folk (on developers) have been having mixed
feeling over it. A clarification was posted to (developers) which is
also included below. I was wondering how the FreeBSD folk felt.
Note: a number of people have taken offense over the OSS usage in
the first post. This is clarified in the second post.
================================================================
To: coda-announce@TELEMANN.coda.cs.cmu.edu,
Coda Discussion <linux-coda@TELEMANN.coda.cs.cmu.edu>
Happy 1999!
I have just uploaded the first 5.0 pre release.
There are many differences with 4.6:
- an entirely new directory system which removes a really nasty bug that
plagued the servers for years.
- many improvements to the networking code, in particular, much more
stable computations of bandwidth and retransmission times.
- Coda is now GPL'd - primarily because we want to indicate that we are
really an OSS project.
This is a good moment for maintainers of Debian, Sparc Linux and other
platforms to jump forward.
We will smooth out some remaining bugs during the next few weeks. We will
come out with a Windows 95 client next week and an NT server soon, as well
as with the NetBSD/FreeBSD releases. Windows 95 is hard to build right
now (wait until next week) or read the coda-HOWTO, for BSD you should be
ok.
A couple of other points:
- a new Coda HOWTO was written. Have a look at:
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/coda-howto.html
source in
ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/doc/coda-howto.sgml
- We have a bugs list (Jitterbug): please read them and fix them!
- I have made a list of some projects that are falling between the cracks
here.
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/todo.html
Have fun, let us know what is good (and bad).
- Peter -
=================================================================
Let me try clarify the dicussions about Coda and its recent adoption
of the GPL.
1. HISTORY
First, I have been a BSD follower since 4.2BSD. I worked on the
porting of Mach to various platforms. Perhaps most signficantly I did
the Mach i386 distribution and supported the Mach 2.5 kernel and later
Mach 3.0 kernel. I have most recently worked on kernel support for
Coda on x86 for NetBSD and FreeBSD, though the original code was
written by others.
I am low on the Coda organizational totem pole. Peter Braam (who made
the original post) is a senior systems scientist who leads Coda
development. He reports to the Coda PI, Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya
for short). Satya is responsible for making the GPL decision and did
so only after careful thought. He has advised many students whose
theses make up Coda. Numerous people (~20) have worked on Coda in the
past.
When Coda was proposed to be included in the NetBSD & FreeBSD systems
and allowed in, there was no plan at that time that to GPL Coda. So I
was acting in good faith. Satya made the decision to GPL Coda only in
December 1998.
2. RATIONALE FOR DECISION
Satya has pondered how Coda will survive when contract funding for it
ceases. He also has considered who, if anyone, should profit from it
when all the people who contributed to it at the university have
graduated and gone their separate ways. Next, there is the issue of
Coda source fragmentation. Satya believes that GPL is more likely to
ensure that Coda remains coherent, preserving a single copy of Coda
with the same API for every user/builder/supporter. Finally, Satya
also believes that GPL reassures potential contributors that their
work will forever remain publicly available, and not become the
captive of some company that derives sole benefit from it. These were
the reasons for his deciding to GPL Coda.
Note that components of Coda that have independent use (typically
libraries such as RVM and RPC2) are under the less restrictive LGPL.
Most importantly, KERNEL CODE IN NetBSD AND FreeBSD IS NOT GPL'ED.
They preserve the original copyright from CMU under which they were
integrated into NetBSD and FreeBSD. We have no plans to change this.
However, if it will make the NetBSD and FreeBSD communities more
comfortable, WE ARE WILLING TO TRANSFER OWNERSHIP OF THIS CODE TO
THEM.
3. WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
Let's let the dicussions proceed for a while and I will wait for an
answer from core. I think that GPL is a fact of life. Our
compilation tools are GPL'ed, visit /usr/src/gnu. I don't accept that
we have a system without the comp tools. Further, I would find it
difficult to survive w/o some flavor of emacs which is GPL/ed, etc ...
I don't think that it should matter that the Coda application code is
GPL'ed.
In a past discussion, it was maintained that if Coda was in the kernel
it should be in the source tree. It was resolved that it was
unfeasable to split Coda apart and populate the source tree with the
directories and still maintain synchronization with Coda development.
Perry suggested that Coda be maintained in a shadow tree like gnu is.
This was defered for a while because we were not ready. Perry's plan
is sensible and I will follow up on it if Coda remains part of NetBSD
and FreeBSD.
Finally, you could just yank Coda out of the kernel and make it an lkm
only. This would make life more difficult for me, since lkms are
currently difficult to debug in NetBSD. However, I am willing to do
this if that's the preferred outcome.
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