kern/74861: Support to ISL VLANS?

[Yar Tikhiy]

The following reply was made to PR kern/74861; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Yar Tikhiy <yar at comp.chem.msu.su>
To: Josef Karthauser <joe at FreeBSD.org>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: kern/74861: Support to ISL VLANS?
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:22:25 +0300

 On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 03:18:31PM +0000, Josef Karthauser wrote:
 > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 05:22:05PM +0300, Yar Tikhiy wrote:
 > > I'm afraid that this PR is doomed.  5 years ago I worked for an
 > > academic network operations centre, where we ran ISL in FreeBSD
 > > using a homebrew implementation based on vlan(4).  Later, after I
 > > had got my commit bit, I wrote a mail to Cisco asking if they would
 > > like to relicense the ISL spec so that it could be implemented in
 > > open-source products.  I got an apparently negative reply.
 > > 
 > > I still have working ISL code, but alas, I cannot make it public
 > > due to restrictive nature of Cisco's license on ISL.
 > 
 > I don't know where this code came from exactly, but Joe suggested that
 > it was open sourced... That said perhaps it doesn't matter now with
 > 802.1Q in common usage.
 
 The code from Joe Marcus Clarke looks like a protocol dissector for
 some kind of a network sniffer while I've got an if_isl driver
 working in 4-STABLE.  However, it may not be included into FreeBSD
 for licensing reasons I described.  The very ISL _specification_
 is under a restrictive license by Cisco, not code implementing it.
 On the one hand, I doubt that Cisco would sue a network sniffer
 project for including an ISL dissector, but on the other hand, we
 would be asking for legal trouble if we added if_isl to FreeBSD
 since it would be a real application of the encumbered protocol.
 There were enough license wars in the nearest past out there.
 
 Taking this into consideration, I think this PR can be closed.
 
 -- 
 Yar