re: "Why Debian NetBSD"

[matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>]

   Well put, and an important point.  MY understanding of RMS, and of the BSD
   license would seem to indicate that what's done with the code is no one's
   business.  If your M$, and you want to absorb BSD code, or some evil
   dicator somewhere, it doesn't matter, the code is free to use, as you see
   fit.  Nothing binding involved.
   
   Of course, it never hurts to have people accept a project, but what the
   nay-sayers yell is unimportant.  As soon as a BSDer yells "Hey, you
   shouldn't be doing that with the code", they really _aren't_ a BSDer ;).



well, this isn't really true.  there *are* conditions on a BSD-style
license, it's just not viral like the GPL (ie, you can use it without
all you other code being made GPL'ed.)  the conditions normally are:

	- must retain copyright & license notice

	- redistrubution in binary form must put the copyright notice in
	documentation/other that comes with it

	- all adverts meantioning the feature must say something [*]

	- you can't use the authors name for promotion

[*] this condition has been removed from the original berkeley code,
but many individuals still keep this clause in their own copyright.


when these are violated, BSD people get rather upset.  particularly
what upsets people is when a BSD license is removed and a GPL one is
added....



i thought for a while about this question, and i asked a bunch of
other netbsd developers.  i can't see there being any huge issue with
using GNU/NetBSD from that side of the fence.  mostly they still don't
understand the basic "why" of debain-bsd :-)


.mrg.