[Discuss] Home NAS redux

[Rich Pieri]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:32:27 -0500
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> The Linux kernel is not a derivative of the BSD kernel. While there

If GPL code is copied into the BSD kernel then according to the GPL that
would make the BSD kernel derivative of the upstream GPL software. The
GPL requires such derivative software to be licensed under the GPL.


On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 08:34:24 -0500
Mark Woodward <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:

> Well, very little has been "borrowed" from the BSD kernel. I think 

Many of the Linux kernel device drivers were taken from *BSD or are
licensed under one of the BSD licenses. There are at least 185 files
with BSD licenses on them in the 2.6.32 source tree. That's what I
found with a single grep command. I leave it to the reader to grep for
the relevant strings in the source tree.

> mostly just the TCP stack, but that was mostly government funded, so 

Linux has had several written from scratch but I'm not aware of it ever
using *BSD's stack. I could be mistaken about this.

> that doesn't concern me too much. What about Linux threads on BSD?

Linuxthreads is a Port. It is not part of the *BSD kernels.


> You are stating subjective opinion as fact and as such is not a 
> debatable point. However, what was actually done by Tivo was against

Darwin, the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X and iOS, is
XNU+FreeBSD kernel and FreeBSD userspace. This is a fact, not an
opinion.

iPhone and iPad have put Darwin -- thus FreeBSD -- in the hands of more
users around the world than any other Unix vendor has managed. This is a
fact, not an opinion.

This makes Apple the largest *BSD shop in the world.

Apple published all of the Darwin source code less some binary blobs.
This is a fact, not an opinion:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/

WebKit started out as KHTML and all of that code was contributed back
upstream. This is a fact, not an opinion. See above URL.

Apple stopped using GPLv3 software because (among other reasons) the
FSF declared iPhone incompatible with the GPLv3 due to the
cryptographic signature clause. This is a fact, not an opinion.


> the spirit of the GPL and the FSF was more than justified. The spirit
> of the GPL is that the writers give their software to the users NOT
> the distributors. [snip]

Not to nit pick but Linus Torvalds disagrees with you. And it's his
software, his choice of license, not yours.

I think I'm done with this, Mark. I'm not a zealot. I'm a practical
realist.

-- 
Rich P.