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Re: I've got a bad feeling about this...



On Oct 15, matthew green wrote:
>    NetBSD. Licensing.
>    
>    Appears to be old (non-revised) BSD license... certainly the INSTALL.txt
>    file for 1.6 has lines at the beginning of the ungodly long section for
>    the NetBSD project (in two forms, no less!)
>    
>    Pardon me while I sink into despair of ever untangling the mess, even if
>    we can use it (is the old BSD license DFSG-non-free?)
> 
> 
> the biggest problem isn't that TNF has a "clause 3" but that N
> contributers also do.  however, that list is maintained in
> distrib/notes/legal i think so you can easily get a list of
> "clause 3"'s in the netbsd source tree.  unfortunately, these
> aren't linked to the sources they refer to cuz in some cases
> this list is 100's of files across the whole tree.
> 
> 
> it was my understanding the old 4 clause UCB license was DFSG
> happy, anyway.

The four-clause license is DFSG-free; however, it is
GPL-incompatible.  This shouldn't be a problem with the NetBSD kernel,
but it might be a problem if you need to link some NetBSD code to
GPLed code in userland.  (For example, if you need to link some
4-clause library to gcc.)


Chris
-- 
Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@phy.olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/

Computer Systems Manager, Physics and Astronomy, Univ. of Mississippi
125B Lewis Hall - 662-915-5765



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