FreeBSD and MacOS

[Justin Walker]

On Jul 1, 2004, at 7:27, Eitarou Kamo wrote:

> Hi Q,
>
> Q wrote:
>
>>> My curiosity is that the FreeBSD and NetBSD license are left.
>>> And should those licenses are kept after porting?
>>
>> Yes the original license and copyright notices are all kept intact, 
>> it's one of the requirements of virtually every opensource license. 
>> To remove them would be a violation of the original copyright holders 
>> requirements.
>>
> This is important. For the people to port from now this must
> be a point, not to port beyond the law.
>
> The words "Redistributions" in the FreeBSD License includes
> "porting"?
>
> But I heard, the algorithm of the source code wasn't preserved
> by the copyright. In the case of the porting from FreeBSD to other
> different flavor OS (e.g. Linux), the algorithm is used. But the 
> variables or
> way of writing is not used.

This is a fine point of copyright law, and few engineers/programmers 
are in a position to know the answer.  Your best bet is to read the 
license in full, and refer to a lawyer familiar with this area of law.  
Check the websites for the EFF <http://www.eff.org> and OSI 
<http://opensource.org> for details.

>  In this case what should I do? Ethically I should
> notice FreeBSD license. But.... It's a bit contradiction, I think.

I'm not sure what you mean by "this case".  If you are porting Darwin 
code to some other system, then you have to follow the license 
requirements for the components you use.  As has been pointed out 
earlier in this thread, some of the Darwin OS code is from FreeBSD and 
other sources with similar licenses; and some is developed largely by 
Apple (so the APSL applies).  If you are porting to Darwin, then the 
license on the code you start with applies.

In either case, you do need to understand the license issues.  The best 
we can do is to answer specific questions, but you still may be better 
off discussing this via one of the above sites.

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
Institute for General Semantics        | Some people have a mental
                                        |  horizon of radius zero, and
                                        |  call it their point of view.
                                        |     -- David Hilbert
*--------------------------------------*-------------------------------*