[gentoo-dev] Gentoo/FreeBSD: license problems require a development pause

[gentoo-dev] Gentoo/FreeBSD: license problems require a development pause

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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Copying from my latest blog post, to let the news be spread without surprises:

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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.

Basically, the public Gentoo/FreeBSD development is officially halted starting 
tonight, as there are some license issues between 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[1]. For this reason, until I can clear this problem up, the stages are 
pulled off from the mirrors, and won’t be put there in the mean time.
s-s-d is not the only GPL-released package that links to libkvm actually, GDB 
does it, too, but I think that on the GPL part, we’re fine with the license, 
as it’s a library that comes with the operating system, the problem is that 
we don’t abide to the advertising clause (and we’ll probably never be able to 
do so) and thus I don’t think we’re allowed to redistribute binaries.

I’ve mailed David O’Brien, who maintains the devel/gdb6 port for FreeBSD, 
hoping that he knows more than me about these interactions, in the mean time, 
I consider the public development of Gentoo/FreeBSD halted. This does not 
mean that I won’t continue working on it, but we cannot currently 
redistribute it.

Bear with us until we can find a solution. If we cannot link libkvm, I’m ready 
to try cleanrooming it into a MIT-licensed library.
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Please note that whatever the problems are, we _are_ going to solve it, and in 
a short time (no more than a month), so we're not dead nor stopped yet :)

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Sound, ALSA, PAM, KDE, CJK, Ruby ...

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo/FreeBSD: license problems require a development pause

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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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/README.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).

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Sound, ALSA, PAM, KDE, CJK, Ruby ...

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo/FreeBSD: license problems require a development pause

[Steve Long]

if u need help with the clean room stuff, give me a shout. when i meet a
coder i really respect, i tell them i'm a clean-room engineer. only then.


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