How about porting LVS to FreeBSD

[Julian Elischer]

Peter Jeremy wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-Apr-19 09:08:29 +0800, dragonfly dragonfly wrote:
>  
>
>>  LVS(http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/) is a widely used server cluster 
>>schedule system,which is be included in Linux official kernel 2.4 and 2.6 
>>release.
>>  Recently i ported LVS/ipvs to FreeBSD,and released 0.1.0 version
>>(http://dragon.linux-vs.org/~dragonfly/htm/lvs_freebsd.htm).
>>    
>>
>
>In its current form, this code cannot be technically or legally
>incorporated into the FreeBSD base.
>  
>

If you look at the website, you'll notice that the person you are 
talking to is one of the
original authors and can therefore assign a a BSD/dual copyright. SO the 
legal
aspects are really just a case of  "getting around to doingthe wordsmithing"

>Looking at the legal aspects:  LVS is covered by the GPL which is
>incompatible with the BSD license.  This is a significant impediment
>to LVS being included in the base system.  As a minimum, all GPL code
>must be clearly identified and it must be possible to remove the code
>from the kernel compilation.
>
>Whilst you have segregated some of the code into a kernel module
>(ipvs), there are still 14 files added or changed in the base kernel.
>I also note that there are no sources to ipvsadm - which is supplied
>as a Linux executable.
>
>Of the 14 files affecting the base kernel:
>- 1 includes a copyright statement with no rights statement.  This code
>  cannot be legally used since the authors have implicitly retained all
>  rights to the code and it therefore cannot be used by anyone else.
>- 4 files have no copyright statement, though in at least once case,
>  the comments imply that a GPL copyright statement has been deleted.
>  Again, this code cannot be legally used.
>- The remaining 9 files are replacements for existing FreeBSD files and
>  include existing copyrights.  There is no obvious legal impediment to
>  those files, though studying the changes would be necessary to
>  confirm that.
>
>As to the technical issues:  The "patch" includes 9 existing files
>that replace existing files.  This is a totally impractical way of
>supplying code changes.  The CVS ID's in those files imply that they
>come from RELENG_5, possibly 5.3-RELEASE.  FreeBSD rules require that
>all new features must be applied to HEAD (currently 6.x) first.  This
>ensures that:
>1) The new features are not lost as FreeBSD moves forward.
>2) New, potentially buggy, code is tested in the "development" branch
>   before being added to a "production" branch.
>The changes to the existing code must be supplied as context or
>unified diffs to ensure that other changes to the code are not lost.
>Much of the new code is not style(9) compliant which would also prevent
>its inclusion into the base system.
>
>  
>