*BSD News Article 39135


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From: kstailey@leidecker.gsfc.nasa.gov (Kenneth Stailey)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Is FreeBSD free?
Date: 07 Dec 1994 15:30:37 GMT
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA
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In-reply-to: alex@pc.cc.cmu.edu's message of 6 Dec 1994 20:21:21 GMT

>FreeBSD and NetBSD both have no GPLed code in the kernel.  NetBSD makes a
>point of having as little as possible elsewhere, but FreeBSD makes the
>decision on a program by program basis (or this is what was going a
>while ago, and as far as I know neither group has changed their stance).

Hey there are a whole lot of worse things than the GPL.  Take software
patents for instance.  Did you know that /usr/ucb/compress is
technically illegal to sell because Unisys has a patent on the algorithm?
Nobody pays much attention to this though.