groff alternative?

[Chuck Swiger]

M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <88862BDF-ED45-42CE-9B24-DEEED2E66C2C at mac.com>
>             Charles Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> writes:
>: If the sole criterion is whether the CDDL permits one to redistribute  
>: private modifications in binary form without source, you're right  
>: that the CDDL is in the same boat as the GPL.
> 
> Wearing my system integration hat, I can tell you that this is a PITA
> to comply with.  One or two isn't so bad, but when you get dozens of
> these things here and there it becomes burdonsome to comply with and
> creates more work for each distribution that we do.

Perhaps there won't be a rush of code adoption from OpenSolaris into FreeBSD, 
but it would be a surprise and a pity if there was nothing to be learned.  I'd 
imagine that the Solaris NFS code would be worth looking at, for instance.

Lots of license flavors are handled OK via src/contrib and throughout the 
entire ports collection now.  It's not as if CDDL-licensed code is going to 
sneak up and infect existing BSD-licensed code; the two licenses are miscible.

> There's also the whole 'does putting it in an embedded system count as
> distribution or not' question that remains unanswered, even in the CDDL.
> WRT the GPL, some say it does (Stallman) while other say it doesn't (Torvalds).

Ah, whether the (re)distribution is a derivative work, or whether it is a mere 
compilation or aggregation.  Yes.  There's case law for art works and book 
anthologies, but not anything I know about for software.

Well, there's no shortage of wacky opinions about people running proprietary 
code on top of GPLed systems.  For example, Eben Moglen and Bruce Perens would 
like to sue ATI and nVidia for releasing proprietary drivers for Linux. [1]

Fortunately, the only opinions which really count about these things come from 
the judges.  I'd rather deal with code than with a lawyer, any day of the 
week...  :-)

> Anyway, since we don't ship groff/roff/etc with the systems we create,
> this specific program doesn't matter much...

4-sec% /usr/bin/nroff --version
GNU nroff (groff) version 1.19
5-sec% uname -a
FreeBSD sec.pkix.net 4.11-STABLE FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE #0: Sat Jun 11 00:25:38 
EDT 2005     root at sec.pkix.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/NORMAL  i386

This seems to be from src/contrib/groff?

-- 
-Chuck

[1]: Message-ID: <425881DE.1050501 at perens.com>.