[openbeos] Re: Parallel GPL Tree?
- From: "Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 05:02:10 +0200 CEST
"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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