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McKusick's Soft Updates now under BSD license

Posted by Nik on from the live-from-the-Usenix-terminal-room dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Kirk McKusick's soft updates page, the soft updates code that had a problematic license in the past is now (as of June 21 2000) released under a BSD license!. This is another big plus for the *BSD community, including some people that were hesitant in adding this stuff in their code base."

4 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. The prior license wasn't free enough for BSD by hodeleri · · Score: 2

    Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on how to obtain complete source code for any accompanying software that uses this software...

    In the BSD world, we want businesses to be able to make proprietary products out of our products. (There are reasons for this which I will avoid discussing in this post.) With the old license in place, some company using softupdates would need to provide the source to softupdates, costing them money and time. The old license is not the BSD way.

    --
    Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

    --
    marotti.com
    1. Re:The prior license wasn't free enough for BSD by elbuddha · · Score: 2

      Of course its hard to tell without asking Kirk himself why the old license was in place...

      No need to ask him, its right there in the README file that accomanied the code (in FreeBSD at least):

      "The idea is to allow those of you freely redistributing your source to use it while retaining for myself the right to peddle it for money to the commercial UNIX vendors."

    2. Re:The prior license wasn't free enough for BSD by nxsy · · Score: 2

      No, quite obviously it wasn't intended for use in proprietary products without fee. If you wanted to use it in your proprietary product, you could pay for it. Your product will work with or without softupdates, so it's a matter of whether you're willing to contact Mr. Mckusick and see what sort of arrangement you could get.

      I'm quite sure, and hope, Kirk was able to make some money out of it, which allows him to continue developing and contributing. From the beginning, it was intended to be released under BSDL later, but still allowed the open source BSDs to use it, and help develop, test, and contribute towards it. I think this is great.

      I'm happy the BSDL allows this to happen - Kirk has worked on BSD for years, distributing the results under the BSDL, and other licenses might not have given him the opportunity to fund his development simply by developing. Of course the 'service and support' side could work, and does, but that one can make a living with updates, speedups, new algorithms, and redesigns is mostly the point.

      I think this is the BSD way. The other license is simply not the BSD license, but definitely fits in with the BSD way, in the grand scheme of things.

  2. Re:good stuff by jarkko · · Score: 2

    And here are detailed instructions for NetBSD.