Re: About bug 1281: bin86 copyright
>
> In article <[🔎] m0v9hp2-000HVrC@liw.clinet.fi> Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:
>
> > Bug report 1281 (more than a year old) asks:
> >
> > > Does this prevent us from distributing on commercial media? (Such as a
> > > CD-ROM.)
> > > This is the as86 and ld86 distribution written by Bruce Evans. It's
> > > copyright Bruce Evans, all rights reserved although you may use and
> > > copy it for your personal use.
> >
> > The /usr/doc/copyright/bin86 file from version 0.3-1 still says
> > the same thing. Has anybody checked on this, and asked Bruce Evans
> > about it?
>
> I did years ago, and he answered that he never placed such
> restrictions on these programs. This restriction probably was added by
> Linus at a time when Linux wasn't distributed under the GPL (wild
> speculation ...)
>
> FreeBSD contains them with a 'fine' license (either GPL or BSDish),
> however they might differ from the Linux-patched versions.
>
> The clean approach would be to use FreeBSD's (or ELKS') version and
> check whether they need some modification in order to compile the
> kernel bootstrap code correctly.
But how about asking Burce Evans what restrictions there _are_ on
his programme? Now, all we know is that he didn't place
the current restrictions on it. Does that mean there are no restrictions
on copying it (public domain)?
I guess I should (as current debian bin86 maintainer) ask Bruce Evans
about this? I'm not sure taking the FreeBSD one, as maybe it does work
on my mashine, but not on a 386, or whatever -- with the current bin86
we know it works on all mashines with linux, and I guess the FreeBSD people
will not guarantee it works with linux on all x86 versions, will they?
--
joost witteveen
joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl
joostje@debian.org
--
Use Debian/GNU Linux!
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