viral license free fork of freebsd
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Fri Oct 5 13:46:08 PDT 2007
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, LI Xin wrote:
> Aryeh Friedman wrote:
>> I am intrested in putting together a version of FreeBSD (at least the
>> non-ports portion) that is 100% viral license (gpl and lgpl [not
>> techinically viral but I don't trust it]) free... where would be a good
>> starting point on this project?
>
> Set MK_GNU = no, and MK_GNU_SUPPORT = no?
>
> Well, if you want a moderate amount of work you may want to try replacing
> sort(1) with the old BSD one, and optimize it. Also some *roff stuff, etc.
> If you are really energyic then you will want to join a project like llvm or
> so for a better compiler.
>
> My opinion is that, while licensing issue is important, but there are a lot
> of other factors that must be taken into account. If a new piece of
> software has better code quality, better performance, etc., then it would be
> a big bonus over "just with a license we liked" :-) Optimizing libc/regex
> might be a good start if you want to go this way.
It's not clear this is comprehensive, but it may still be useful in discussing
replacing GPL'd components with non-GPL'd ones:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ContribSoftware
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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