general Darwin imports (was Re: Darwin cmd import?)

[Michael W. Lucas]

On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 07:55:21PM -0400, Robert Watson wrote:
> The FreeBSD Core Team took a look at the APSL a while back, and decided
> that similar to LGPL/GPL, it was an acceptable license for use in
> userspace for stand-alone tools, but that similar protections to LGPL/GPL
> would be required for kernel code (not built by default, carefully marked,
> etc).  That said, Apple tends to release only code they've heavily
> rewritten or created from scratch under APSL; code they modify tends to
> remain under the existing license (CMU, BSD, etc).  Generally they're
> careful to label the license on the download page.


I'm writing an article about Apple's licensing and returning code to
the community, but if you want to become a committer read this:

Apple has made a lot of improvements to various FreeBSD utilities, and
re-released them under the original licensing.  This provides an
excellent source of patches.

People may gripe about Apple not returning stuff to the open source
community.  The truth is, they have.  They aren't responsible for
converting what they return into a format we can use, but they haven't
deliberately obfuscated their code.  Sorting out the diffs would be a
pain, but not horribly difficult.

According to Jordan Hubbard, the best source of low-hanging fruit is
their modified libc.  They've had people work out all sorts of bugs,
clean up functions, performance improvements, etc.  Libc changes
require extensive testing.  They also have wide-reaching benefits.
It's still BSDL'd, so we can take back whatever we want.

If you want a commit bit, go and pick some of this fruit and send-pr
it.

==ml

-- 
Michael Lucas		mwlucas at FreeBSD.org, mwlucas at BlackHelicopters.org
   "I'm sorry, but 'Social Darwinism' is no excuse for killing all of 
	           your co-workers."  -- Ivan Brunetti
		http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/