Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 01:57:40 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dillon@earth.backplane.com (Matt Dillon) Cc: bright@wintelcom.net (Alfred Perlstein), tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), josb@cncdsl.com, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DJBDNS vs. BIND Message-ID: <200102200157.SAA05156@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <200102191854.f1JIsBQ37549@earth.backplane.com> from "Matt Dillon" at Feb 19, 2001 10:54:11 AM
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> Many open source licenses distinguish between commercial and > non-commercial > use, and a change of status would certainly apply there (e.g. a > non-profit company merges with a for-profit company), but I don't know > a single open source / freeware license that gives a damn whether > a commercial company is being aquired by another commercial company. My point was that many of the licenses permit local modification, or local combination with software under other licenses, but prohibit distribution of the modified code (like Dan's license) or are inherently impossible to distribute and retain the legal license (like the commercial binaries we can't put on the FreeBSD CDROMs, or a FreeBSD kernel with a GPL'ed driver compiled into it). The Soft Updates license has changed. Before the change, there was a legal risk, which I don't believe Kirk would have pressed, unless there was an aggregious offense, that FreeBSD kernels with Soft Updates compiled into them could not have their ownership transferred, and retain license to use the code. This would have been real easy to work around, by having the new owners recompile the kernels with the Soft Updates, and thus make new, non-transferred combinations equivalent to the old ones. For DJBDNS, this would mean extracting the changes to the code as a set of patches, and then having the new owners apply the patches to the unaltered DJBDNS code, since the binaries of the modified code themselves are not permitted to be redistributed. There's a lot of skirting of the GPL that goes on out there, using the technique of requiring the end user to perform the link operation themselves, so that the proprietary code can continue to be proprietary, even when it's linked against, for example, GDBM (this gets around the "built to be linked only with the GPL'ed code equals a derivative work, since there are other DBM codes that can be used instead, so long as no GDBM specific interfaces were used). The Sleepycat licenses are similarly not redistributable, but you can build something that needs the libraries, and let the end user seperately obtain the code. The main point is that there is a lot of toxic licensing out there, and DJBDNS falls into that category. We couldn't make DJBDNS into a package instead of a port because the patches are not OK for a binary distribution. This basically means that it couldn't be an install option on whether you got DJBDNS or BIND, since installation really requires binaries in hand, or things end up getting too complex, taking a long time, and FreeBSD ends up looking bad at the worst possible time: the user's first exposure to the system, the install. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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