Re: Stop Debian/FreeBSD
John Goerzen wrote:
> Peter Makholm <peter@makholm.net> writes:
>
> > I see no problem with SPI supporting all kinds of free software and
> > Debian FreeBSD won't become propitary it can't nobody can tell us
> > (Debian) to stop developing it as a piece of free software.
>
> The fact that SPI will not make it proprietary does not prevent it
> from becoming so. The BSD license permits it. And people have, and
> continue to, exploit this weakness in the BSD license.
Debian is no more entirely GPL than FreeBSD ports are all BSD-licensed. Some
major components of Debian are BSD, or X, or Artistic licensed, not to mention
all the other DFSG-free licenses in use by particular packages. The "core" of
Debian GNU/Linux is GPL, of course, as the "core" of FreeBSD is BSD.
IMHO, one of the strongest things about FreeBSD is its ability to "make world"
for the entire core distribution, and I wouldn't want to see a Debian
FreeBSD project simply adopt a BSD kernel but abandon this facility. (If
anything, I'd like to see this sort of feature become available within Debian
GNU/Linux.) Rather, I think that the "Debianization" should take place within
the ports tree.
This would seem to answer any objections of John Goerzan, and also creates a
mechanism for Debianizing even non-DFSG platforms. (NT+Cygnus anyone?) It is
also likely to be accepted by the FreeBSD people, and prevent a fourth BSD fork.
For those who are familiar with FreeBSD, you may know that ports currently get
installed with the "pkg_install" program. Once dpkg is ported to FreeBSD, we
might convince the FreeBSD porters to use it instead, thus greatly improving the
ability of ported software to migrate between BSD and Debian in general.
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