Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Jan 2007 18:08 UTC
"Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected. The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good news is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed. At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
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Member since:
2005-06-30
I was thinking that GPL had gotten over the BSD license issue since god-knows-when, and never thought there was an aftermath...
Anyway, this goes to show how an infinitely small item can cause general mayhem. And that the continual recreation of licenses mildly different from each other is Bad(TM).
However, it won't hurt the main community. Few people use Gentoo/FreeBSD. Rather, Apple and MS may be worse hit -- both used much of BSD code in their own system, and exactly how many copyright violations they have made... (I've personally never seen any Apple or MS ad with the clause...)
And some people can still throw chairs around and warn that Linux potentially violate patents. Seems like they aren't so legal after all...