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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!sdd.hp.com!wupost!uunet!stanford.edu!rutgers!igor.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Restrictions on 'free' UNIX / 386BSD (Linux licensing) Message-ID: <Aug.16.20.35.57.1992.15736@athos.rutgers.edu> Date: 17 Aug 92 00:35:58 GMT References: <l8n8qcINN2c5@neuro.usc.edu> <PHR.92Aug15151100@soda.berkeley.edu> <63DILTJ@taronga.com> <1992Aug16.210036.17095@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 45 terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes: > Or, put another way: It's hard to contribute code to Linux and >Berkeley (or anything else) at the same time. This seems to be wrong. It's attributing a far greater degree of coordination to Linux than actually exists. Linus himself sort of uses the GPL. The kernel code simply says (C) 1991 Linus Torvalds. He has asserted separately that it may be redistributed under the terms of the GPL. But I believe other terms could be negotiated as well. Linus has no objections to commercial distributions of Linux. He is certainly not the extremist that rms is. There has never been a requirement that all Linux code must be covered by the GPL. Pieces of code from authors other than Linus carry whatever terms the authors choose, although I think it's assumed by everyone that code will be freely redistriutable. There is certainly Berkeley code used with Linux, though not in the kernel. (This may change with TCP/IP support in the kernel -- I don't know what they are doing, but I have assumed it would be based on some version of Berkeley's TCP/IP.) What is true is that code contributed to the Linux kernel will end up with Linus' copyright being added to it, and rewritten to fit his coding style and his views of the way the kernel should work. That does not affect your ability to continue redistributing the original. It also assumes that the code is integrated by Linus. It's perfectly acceptable to supply additional code that users will have to install for themselves. There are no constraints on things outside the kernel. Outside the kernel Linux is a typical network hackers' product: There's no central authority, and no official distributions. There are people who put together root disks roughly in sync with the kernel, but those people are not under Linus' control, and as far as I can tell they take the best software they can find without any particular requirements on copyright aside from being redistributable. Somebody else coordinates the libraries and GCC. Since they are based on glibc and gcc, obviously most of this is covered by the GPL. A few portions of the library are taken from BSD. Those particular modules continue to be governed by the BSD copyright. The nearest equivalent to the full 386BSD release is something done by the Manchester Computing Consortium. It's a packaged release which seems to have a good reputation. But they have no official status, and there are a couple of other people trying to do their own releases.