
"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."
Member since:
2006-09-24
Aren't they looking at this a bit bass-ackwards. stop-start-daemon was written after libkvm and used code from libkvm. It would seem the authors of stop-start-daemon should have paid attention to what the license was on the code they borrowed and chose to properly respect it, not turn around and expect the authors of libkvm to relicense because they don't like the ad clause.