[openbeos] Re: Parallel GPL Tree?

"Nathan Whitehorn" <nathanw@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There's a lot of GPL code for BeOS, especially including lots of 
> drivers, many coded by the companies who wrote them: the C-Media and 
> Ensoniq drivers, the ATI Mach 64 and 3c509 drivers (which include a 
> wrapper for Linux drivers of any kind, etc.), the Broadcom drivers, 
> among many others. These would be nice to have affiliated with the 
> OpenBeOS project, and useful for better hardware support. The 
> difficulty is licensing. Thus I suggest that we create a parallel, 
> FreeBSD-style GNU tree, with the rule that nothing in it can be 
> essential to the functioning of the OS -- you can turn it on in the 
> build system and get more drivers, if you want, or leave it out, sort 
> of like (ironically, especially given the reasons we chose BSD :P) 
> the 
> "non-free" repository in Debian linux. This would be really, really, 
> really useful.

$ ./configure --help

Usage: ./configure <options>
options:
  --floppy <floppy location>    Specifies the location of the floppy
                                (device or image).
  --bochs-debug                 Activates bochs serial debug emulation.
  --include-gpl-addons          Include GPL licensed add-ons.
  --help                        Prints out this help.

Looks like we already have something like this.
Also, I think licensing is not a big problem; it could be for media 
applications, though - but I am not sure about that either.
As a matter of fact, our license is compatible with the GPL - anyone 
could relicense our code as GPL and go from there (of course, we would 
continue to write our patches against our MIT like license). Therefore, 
I think we can safely add these drivers to the repository, and use them 
like all the others.

You can also create commercial applications on top of Linux - which is 
completely GPLd, and you can certainly consider the kernel to be a 
crucial system component :-)

Bye,
   Axel.

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