Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:37:31 -0800 From: Wilfredo Sanchez <wsanchez@apple.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Apple's open source... Message-ID: <199903191936.LAA33678@scv4.apple.com>
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I noticed that there was a conversation on Darwin here, and I thought it would be worth replying to some of it. Note I'm not in this list; I was just browsing the archive. I hope this is helpful. Jeremy Lea <reg@shale.csir.co.za>: | I'm not one for Brett style advocacy, but this takes the cake. They | used BSD and CMU licensed software to develop most of the OS, and then | release it with a big announcement of 'open source' under a more | restrictive license... Actually large parts of what we are redistributing are done so under the original license. I put the Apple License on anything that might have code in it which is significantly ours, whether that is in fact the case or not, because that was to best way for me to get more code out early. I hope to clean that up some later, when I get more time to go through things carefully. You'll notice, perhaps, that text_cmds, for example, it all NetBSD code with minor bug fixes I've done over the past year and a half, and we not only didn't put the Apple license on that code, but I've committed those changes into NetBSD's tree. We have no intention of duplicating effort and forking projects from wherever we're getting them if we can help it. You'll probably also not that the kernel does have the Apple license on it, and while much of the code is BSD and CMU code, I feel this is fairly well justfified, because we've added a whole lot into that project (HFS+ support, AppleTalk, lots of other work). That's not to say that we aren't willing to send all of our NFS code to the BSD groups without Apple license restrictions, but it does mean that for now, we need to start restrictive, and then think about relaxing things. It's not possible to go the other way. Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>: | Worse still, the press is mentioning Linux in articles about the | announcement, and crediting it for the move, even though NOT A | SINGLE SHRED of the software that's being released is under the | GPL or part of Linux. It's all BSD-derived, or under the MIT X | or Apache licenses. Um, last I checked emacs, grep, groff, gawk, gnutar, and others were under the GPL. We don't have anything under the MIT X license to my knowledge. Please do your research before making such an assertion. I don't think we're hiding the fact that BSD provided much of our code. 4.4BSD is an advertised component of Mac OS X Server. In any case, the code speaks for itself. Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>: | Even if we don't get *attention*, won't this mean that developers might | be "more inclined" to have their code compile under the *BSD's? Isn't | that a good thing? FreeBSD is our primary reference compatibility platform. When we are wondering how X should behave, I log into freebsd.apple.com (in my office) and find out. We also check Solaris and Linux, because it helps to play nice with them, too. | We do need to improve the visibility of the *BSD connection, We are trying, by the way, with the advertising clause. The installation manual for Mac OS X Server (both printed and on-disk) includes a big list of acknolwegdements for the BSD stuff as well as every other copyright I could find (just to be fair, even though it's not required). Keep in mind that it's not a trivial thing to paste that much spew into every document we produce. | As to the licensing issues, I was assuming the "more restrictive | license" referred to *Apple* source code that is being released. | Ie, the source for Appletalk support, or HFS support, etc. They | are releasing more source code than just the pieces from *BSD's, | after all. Seems to me that this "more restrictive" license is | an improvement over no source at all for those things -- which is | the only license we used to have for them. In all fairness, we did start more restrictive than the ideal, and as I said, I'll look into correcting that over time. "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>: | If Apple actually contributes code back, I won't actually care so | much what their PR dept. does or does not acknowledge. It would be | *very nice* to get public acknowledgement, don't get me wrong, but | there are all kinds of "technology partners" out there and the ones | who contribute technical assistance (bug fixes, reports, etc) are | just as valuable in their own way. We'd love to get a better-established relationship with FreeBSD, as I mentioned before. We really like FreeBSD. We have a nice arrangement with NetBSD and a really excellent one with the Apache Group. I think we may want to be more plublic about these things; it may be good for all involved. I'll see what I can do about that. In fact, I'm still looking to use FreeBSD libraries in the future, and I've even started some of the porting work, though I keep getting distracted. :-) -Fred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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