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Date:      Sun, 12 Aug 2001 16:13:23 -0600
From:      Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>
To:        tlambert2@mindspring.com
Cc:        Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: bash in /usr/local/bin?
Message-ID:  <15222.65411.958969.341986@nomad.yogotech.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B76C8C6.D7C0D639@mindspring.com>
References:  <3B74D180.D036D629@hway.net> <3B75D33D.68368F22@softweyr.com> <3B764D47.6060902@yahoo.com> <3B76555B.891321BF@mindspring.com> <20010812125329.A1111@schweikhardt.net> <3B76C8C6.D7C0D639@mindspring.com>

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> > # Bash has a license which precludes its inclusion as part
> > # of the base system.
> > 
> > [Not that I favor more shells on the root file system, but anyway:]
> > What about gcc and grep? Does the license differ or are these not regarded
> > being part of the base system?
> 
> We would get rid of them if we could.  We keep their source
> code in a ghetto, since we can't.  Any company wanting to get
> rid of all GPL'ed and other restrictively licensed code in a
> FreeBSD based binary distribution can simply dike the ghetto
> out of the build tree, and build a still usable system binary
> from it, with no restrictively licensed code.
> 
> Changing grep and tar was an incredibly bad decision.  It has
> the distinction that the old, free code is there in the Attic,
> and can be recovered, if need be.

Umm, Terry.  There was no 'free' tar.  Back in the 386BSD days, when we
were looking for a free tar, I contacted Andy Tanenbaum (of Minix) and
got permission to use it, since we didn't have one.  However, it was
voted down as being 'too simple', so we opted for the GNU one.

There isn't a BSD or public domain version of tar anywhere to be found,
unless you consider 'pax' running in tar emulation mode acceptable.  (I
certainly don't.)

The same story exists with grep.


Nate

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