Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 11:40:15 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: ian_stewart@nyro.com (Ian H. Stewart) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD be used in a commercial way? Message-ID: <199602070110.LAA06030@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <3117A001.E4E@nyro.com> from "Ian H. Stewart" at Feb 6, 96 10:37:53 am
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Ian H. Stewart stands accused of saying: > > I am interested in using FreeBSD > as a foundation for a complete OS. I'm curious; what do you mean by a 'complete' operating system? What does FreeBSD lack in meeting your definition of complete? > What is needed to use or license the > 2.1 release so that we may sell it > commercially with value. There are essentially two licenses that you need to work with. The majority of FreeBSD is licensed under the BSD-style license, which essentially says that you must acknowledge the original authors of the work in your printed documentation, and that neither your use of the work nor your acknowledgement of the authors can be used as promotional material. The second, and more problematic, license is the GPL. This effectively requires that you provide the source code to certain parts of the system. (Most notably the C compiler, assembler and linker, as well as a number of other tools. These are kept in a seperate part of the source tree, so you can look in /usr/src/gnu/ and see what's involved.) A good lawyer would be able to tell you more, but essentially apart from the provision of source code to parts of the system, and acknowledging the origins of the rest of it, there aren't any other licensing requirements. > Ian H. Stewart -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai [[
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