A licensing issue (or maybe not an issue) for -legal:
1) The NetBSD source tree (that is, the sources which can be found at the
official NetBSD CVS server, and from which the NetBSD releases are
drawn) has a number of sections to it, with widely varying licenses
(though most can be classed as 'old BSD', 'revised BSD', 'derived from
old BSD', 'GPL', or 'LGPL').
2) Not all of the sections in 1 are relevant to the Debian/NetBSD port.
In fact, quite a few of them are third-party software which is already
packaged separately under Debian. However, the sections which can best
be classed as "the kernel" (sys/ in the CVS tree), "system libraries"
(lib/ and libexec/), and potentially some portions of the userland
(bin/ and specific cases in usr.bin/ and usr.sbin/) are necessary. A
preliminary inspection indicates that most of the required pieces fall
under the old BSD license, with a few under the revised BSD license or
the GPL. The majority of these have copyrights by either UCB or The
NetBSD Foundation, Inc. (TNF)
3) TNF has previously expressed a resistance to requests to move from an
old BSD license to a revised one (that is, to drop the advertising
clause). While it may be possible to convince them to change this at
some point in time, it would be infeasible to assume that this can be
accomplished soon, if at all.
4) The NetBSD source tree has a set of legal files which are generated
based on a combination of a shared list of credits and an architecture
specific list of credits, to satisfy the numerous advertising clauses
found in the source tree. However, this file assumes that the entire
source tree is in use, and currently has no provisions for rebuilding it
based on a partial source tree such as the Debian/NetBSD port would use.
(These are found in src/distrib/notes/{common/legal.common,<arch>/legal)
5) While significant portions of the code have been retroactively
relicensed by UCB's fiat, there remain significant portions which have
not, as they are not under UCB's copyright.
The questions:
A) Is it feasible to have an old-BSD license based kernel and system
libraries? This appears, on casual inspection, to qualify for the
purpose of the GPL's 'system library' exception, in both spirit and
letter, but I would hate to get bitten later.
B) What is required to meet the advertising requirements of a 4-clause
BSD license? Would it suffice to have the entirety of the list in the
copyright file, and a pointer from release announcements?
C) Is it acceptable/sufficient to have a superset-list of the credits, or
do we need to go through every file in the relevant parts of the tree
and ensure that we have the correct clause information? (Something that,
by current reports, even the current NetBSD core team handles on a case
by case basis, rather than a full audit).
D) Anything else...
--
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Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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