Public Access to Perforce?
Matthew Dillon
dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Wed Aug 18 19:58:35 PDT 2004
It should be noted that the copyrights on some of the networking pieces
in DragonFly are really a non-issue. For some reason I just couldn't
convince Jeff to go with the standard 3-clause (which is what DragonFly
has adopted as its 'official' copyright). The 4-clause is annoying,
but no less open source then the 3-clause (and that's Kirk's opinion,
not mine!). There is a ton of 4-clause stuff in all the BSD's including
FreeBSD, inherited from copyright statements attributed to authors other
then UCBerkeley (for which the UC Letter does not apply and thus the
clause cannot be removed without tracking down said authors and getting
their permission).
The compromise I reached with Jeff was to separate his copyright from
the 3-clause UC copyright and the 3-clause DFly copyright (all
appropriate copyrights are separately listed in the files), and to
sunset the extra clause in a year so it doesn't create an issue down
the line.
I know there are some hard feelings between some of the principles.
The hard feelings are something I cannot fix, I can only say that I did
my best to accomodate everyone. I sure as hell have no intention of
ripping it out, it's primo code that fits the DragonFly model to a T,
and we have already reaped *huge* benefits for GigE TCP streams out of
it. A 4-clause for 1 year is a small price to pay for such excellent
work.
In the ongoing Saga of all things BSD, this is a tiny blip, and not
worth arguing over.
--
In anycase, I don't know why Bosko is bashing DR for it, DR has nothing
to do with this particular issue. And DragonFly as a project has
adopted the 3-clause for its official copyright so it seems rather unfair
to blast the whole project for what is basically a personal issue between
two developers. I will remind the FreeBSD principles that code borrowing
is a cornerstone of open-source, and it should not be begrudged in any
fashion... and it goes in all sorts of directions. We wouldn't have
a USB stack (you OR me) without NetBSD, don't you forget it! Nor is
DragonFly in any way merely a copy of FreeBSD-5. The greatest
similarities will be in the device driver code, because we are doing
our best to leverage the device work from FreeBSD-5 (and BUSDMA itself
is not a FreeBSD-originated concept, I'll remind people). But there are
*MASSIVE* differences throughout the whole kernel, and that is not a
word that I use lightly.
-Matt
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