Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 15:57:24 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: hiten@uk.FreeBSD.org Cc: Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>, Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>, Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>, Josh MacDonald <jmacd@CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Parity Error <bootup@mail.ru>, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org, reiserfs-dev@namesys.com Subject: Re: [reiserfs-dev] Re: metadata update durability ordering/soft updates Message-ID: <3C967EE4.5E60D36@mindspring.com> References: <20020318195817.26106.qmail@web21105.mail.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hiten Pandya wrote: > > I actually don't understand the remark about needing to pay me > > royalties. If you leave the GPL on the code, and don't violate the GPL > > by integrating it with non-GPL compatible code, you don't need to pay > > me. You can probably talk me into granting waivers on trivially > > incompatible with the GPL licenses. Where you need to pay me is when > > you want someone (yourself or MS or anyone....) to be able to add to > > BDS+ReiserFS without making their additions free. > > I think I get your point (after all this time 8-)). If someone ports > ReiserFS to FreeBSD, there will be no fee; but if someone makes > additions to ReiserFS, than they have to pay you for logical business > reasons, am I right? No. If you want to port the GPL'ed code, fine. If you want to make additionas which are also GPL'ed, fine. If you want to make additionas that you keep to yourself, not fine: you need a license so that your derivative work is not covered by the GPL of the code from which you derived it. > Apart from that, there would be no issue in porting ReiserFS to FreeBSD. One > more question, if the booting part of ReiserFS was re-written in the BSD > License, would there be any issues still existing? :-) Yes. You would not be able to distibute a binary kernel that included ReiserFS in it without GPL'ing FreeBSD (which is not legal, since you aren't the copyright holder). Thus you would be able to load a kernel with the rewritten code, but the kernel would not be able to mount its root FS without the ReiserFS code in the kernel. Loading GPL'ed ReiserFS as a module in this circumstance is not possible, since it's not legal to distribute a binary of such a module, since the module must be linked against the kernel, and the GPL, unlike the LGPL, does not let you escape from this via the "relink clause". In other words, it is not possible to build a FreeBSD CDROM that you sell, or even give away, where the default root FS type following an install from the CDROM is a GPL'ed FS (or any other licensed FS, where the license conflicts with the licenses on the FreeBSD code). You could only build such a CDROM if you licensed the code under terms other than the GPL. So if you wanted to build an appliance that used ReiserFS, and not have to give away your source code for proprietary parts, you would need to purchase a seperate ReiserFS license under other terms, to get yourself out from under the GPL for the proprietary code you add. There are heroic technical measures you could take to get around these restrictions (BeOS links GPL'ed code into GPL external handler programs, and then talks to them via IPC to get around the GPL on come code, for instance), but the effort of doing that is probably more than simply writing a drop-in replacement from scratch, which is more than just licensing the code. IMO, if you wrote a read-only ReiserFS for the boot code, you would be about 75% of the way to a fully functioning ReiserFS, in any case, since the reading process has to be able to interpret a disk following failure, so most of the nuances involved in writing have to be known to the code, with the sole exception of allocation policy and the write code itself. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3C967EE4.5E60D36>