Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues

Posted by Hemos on from the the-hangover-of-license-versions dept.

Alan Trick writes "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.

The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.

At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."

1 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Someone didn't read his next email... by Zaurus · · Score: 5, Informative
    Um, hello? Whoever submitted this basically took the original email that Flameeyes sent, but ignored the next one that came a few minutes later:

    On Sunday 07 January 2007 02:47, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
    > This is a very sad blog by my side, although I hope this can be cleared up
    > soon so that I don't have to be this sad anymore in the future.
    Edit: Timothy (drizzt) found us the escape route. Applying
    ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/READM E.Impt.License.Change we can legally
    drop the clause 3 of 4-clause BSD license, and be done with it. I'm writing
    in this moment the code to do this, but it might require a new stage to come
    out. Anyway, the problem is solved, and I think I'll mail FSF for them to
    actually put that note somewhere, as it doesn't seem to be that documented
    around here.

    This *should* cover our asses about the problem, although I'm still looking if
    there are sources that are redistributed under 4-clause BSD license, and for
    which the license change is not effective (i.e.: they are not under UCB
    copyright).