Re: Debian/GNU Freebsd

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Fri, Feb 19, 1999 at 06:08:00PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
> 
> > > NO!  Is nobody noticing that FreeBSD is BSD license, not GPL?
> > > That commercial people can "adopt" it for binary form, and exploit
> > > our hard work?  That this opens up a SERIOUS vulnerability for the
> > > free software community?
> >
> > the license on the kernel has no bearing on the license of the
> > userland we run on top of it.
>
> Really, now -- did I say it did?  No.

given that we would be taking *bsd's kernel and running our userland
around it, i fail to see where our "hard work" is unless it is in the
userland.

it's THEIR hard work. we would just be using it for our own purposes.


if we want to contribute kernel patches, then the polite thing to do
would be to contribute them under the same license...but there's nothing
stopping us from forking our own version and releasing our patches under
the GPL. nothing except common-sense, that is...we wouldn't want to fork
a BSD kernel any more than we would want to fork a linux kernel.


> > we have other BSD-licensed software in debian, i see no reason why a
> > kernel is any different.
> 
> Because the kernel is far more important.

i don't believe that at all.

having worked with many different kernels, i am 100% convinced that the
userland is far more important. debian's userland is what makes debian
so good, and it would be equally as good on any kernel - linux, hurd,
*bsd, solaris, whatever.


> > BSD license isn't as good as GPL, but it's free enough - it
> > qualifies as DFSG free...that's all that matters.
>
> No, that's not all that matters.  BSD makes it free for us but doesn't
> guarantee that it will remain free.  GPL does.

true. as i said, the GPL is better than the BSD license.  BSD is still
free enough.

craig

--
craig sanders