Recently I came across a possible licensing conflict on one of the Debian projects I'm participating in (the Debian GNU/NetBSD port), and after some discussion of it on the debian-legal mailing list, there wasn't much of a concensus other than "RMS clarifying it would help". A quick summary: 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) 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 question: Is it the intent of the GPL, as it currently stands, that this situation (system libraries which are under a 4-clause/old BSD license) should permit binaries licensed under it to link against those system libraries, when both the system libraries and the GPL-licensed binaries are distributed (along with sources for both) in the standard manner for Debian (that is, as publically available binary and source packages). I understand that this doesn't apply to normal libraries which are not GPL-compatible (Debian does not, of course, knowingly ship packages which have GPL-licensed binaries linked to libraries which are not under a GPL compatible license); this question is solely about linking against the libraries which are build from the non-third-party source found in the NetBSD souce tree. While it would seem likely that prohibiting this is not the intent of the GPL or the FSF (since NetBSD distributes GCC along with it's current releases, and has not, to the best of my knowlege, received complaints), it would be of great assistance in clarifying the situation for Debian if you could comment on it. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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