How about porting LVS to FreeBSD

[Julian Elischer]

Julian Elischer wrote:

>
>
> 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"


sorry ignore this email

>
>> 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.
>>
>>  
>>
>