Linux kernel compatability

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Daniel Eischen <deischen at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>> Has anyone asked, instead of putting Linux shims into FreeBSD,
>> why aren't FreeBSD shims put into Linux?  If the FreeBSD ABI/KPI
>> is supposedly more stable than Linux, then wouldn't it make
>> more sense to do it that way?
>>
>> And I suppose part of the answer to that question is, it would
>> not be acceptible to the Linux folks.
>
>    Pretty sure it's because many hardcore Linux folks don't like the
> BSD license (and the fact that it's business friendly, i.e. closed
> source drivers are ok?). The OSS soundsystem was a prime example of
> what happens when code that's BSD licensed gets put in the Linux
> kernel (well, ok... there were other reasons but as I was reading that
> was a big source of contention with the Linux crowd and that system,
> despite the fact that it was better than ALSA for a long time, and is
> still better in some ways [1]).

Well, they would be shims that just implement the FreeBSD
API using Linux APIs and some glue, so I don't see why they
wouldn't or couldn't be GPL licensed.  I'm assuming (perhaps
incorrectly) that Jeff's proposed Linux shims are BSD
licensed, so the converse should be doable as well.

But regardless, Jeff's already done the work, so they
should just get imported into FreeBSD someplace.

-- 
DE