Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 00:23:19 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: A FreeBSD NDA Project proposal Message-ID: <199909100023.RAA22211@usr06.primenet.com>
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You may have already seen my posting about Checkpoint's software, and their apparent willingness to allow people to port code under a non-disclosure agreement -- despite my failure to set a good subject line on it 8-(. In a more general sense, it occurs to me that it would be useful to have a pool of coders willing to work on such projects on behalf of FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a big edge on Linux, in that binary-only software is OK in our community. The intent of this message is to start a dialogue. I'd like to see the following things come out of it: 1) Establish a willingness on the part of some legal entity, perhaps FreeBSD, Inc., to engage in entering into non-disclosure agreements with companies, on behalf of FreeBSD. Note: these agreements could be made with the up front understanding that non-disclosure of source embodying proprietary information of their hardware is binding only until other disclosure has occurred (e.g., if Linux publishes a driver, then FreeBSD could publish a driver, so long as the comments did not document proprietary information). A lawyer would need to write this up. 2) Establish a pool of volunteers (e.g. normal FreeBSD developers and the like) who have entered into similar agreements with the legal entity from #1, so that they can "hit the ground running" when NDA-ed projects that would benefit FreeBSD come up. 3) Provisions in FreeBSD distributions for building kernels containing binary-only components from third parties, most specifically device drivers and other kernel components of various ilk (e.g. "VXFS" from Veritas, Inc.). 4) Designation of a "manager/advocate" role and a person or persons to fill it, perhaps Jordan Hubbard, whose job it is to seek out opportunities for porting of commercial applications, device drivers, and other such software as would be beneficial to the FreeBSD project to have ported, and to enter into the necessary agreements to expedite the volunteer porters efforts. 5) Where possible, agreements should be ongoing, in particular for device driver ports, so that the devices continue to operate on subsequent releases of FreeBSD. Note: This means that it will likely be necessary to restrict the scope of these projects to -RELEASE only, not -CURRENT, although this may not be the case for individual products. 6) The ability for the FreeBSD project to be able to leverage coders who, while not the calibre of John Dyson, et al., would nevertheless contribute what they could to the FreeBSD project, if an opportunity to do so existed. The initial targets for these developers would be companies like Checkpoint, which allow third party porting of their code, under NDA, and without fee, and hardware vendors for which information necessary to write drivers is not available, except under NDA, but without fee. If the fees are nominal, then the "no fee" requirement may be waived, if funding presents itself. I'm interested in opinions and suggested improvements to this proposal; I know that free software fanatics may not take kindly to the idea of accepting non-free software for distribution; if you feel this way, you are, of course, free to not volunteer. 8-). 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-advocacy" in the body of the message
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