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Date:      05 Oct 2002 17:07:43 -0700
From:      swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen)
To:        Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: grub boot loader or freebsd boot loader
Message-ID:  <zksmzk8m5s.mzk@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <200210050706.g9576Uol091583@lurza.secnetix.de>
References:  <200210050706.g9576Uol091583@lurza.secnetix.de>

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Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de> writes:

> Why would you want to install a bootmanager on a dangerously-
> dedicated disk?  Apart from that, dangerously-dedicated has
> been deprecated, AFAIK.

The second sentence is not relevant as DD is still supported, but I
shouldn't have added my parenthetical mention of DD.  If you're using
GRUB or GAG to boot, then you'll need a partition table, so you won't
have a DD disk, by definition.  (Make it a one-slice install, then.)

> The kernel can certainly not be considered a derivative of
> any bootloader; they don't have anything in common, neither
> do they share any code.  Remember that you can boot FreeBSD
> from the NT boot loader, for example, which isn't even open
> source and certainly has a more restrictive license than
> GRUB.  (Microsoft certainly didn't have supporting Linux or
> BSD in mind when they created their boot loader, while
> FreeBSD is even mentioned in the GRUB documentation, IIRC).

Nobody said the kernel would be considered a derivative of any
bootloader, but a CD which contains both is a derivative of both.  The
question is under what conditions the GPL infects the other parts of
that derivative CD (or .tgz, etc.), making the publishing of it illegal.
(The real question is how confident we are about how certain people
might answer the previous question.)  There is no question that the
loader+kernel forms derivative work; the problem is that people don't/
can't understand what the GPL has to say about escape clauses for
particular derivatives works, especially when they use linking, and
especially because it makes some kind of sense to find that the loader
and kernel are not "independent" since the GPL uses the word loosely.

And remember that you may boot FreeBSD from the NT boot loader, but
you'd better not publish a CD containing both.  (Nobody says there's a
legal problem with using a GPL'd loader locally, but making it part of
the core of the distributed OS is too risky.)

> I'd be much more concerned about other GPL'ed parts of the
> base system.

Why is that not "mere aggregation", and allowed by the GPL?  (And if you
are concerned about that, you shouldn't find it hard to believe that
others will be concerned about the loader, even if in error.)

(Seeing your TLD, I wonder how software license issues are complicated by
the fact that many of the owners of open source software offer their
license under non-USA law.  And whether the local laws of the licensee
AND licensor are involved.  Arggh...)

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