distrubuting distro

Nikolas Britton freebsd at nbritton.org
Wed Feb 2 05:11:53 PST 2005


Nikolas Britton wrote:

> Erik Trulsson wrote:
>
>>
>> But remember that several parts of FreeBSD are covered by the GNU
>> GPL which has somewhat more restrictions (mainly in that (slightly
>> simplified) you need to include the sourcecode for anything you
>> distribute.)
>>
>> In either case it is certainly allowed to sell FreeBSD and charge
>> whatever you want.  You just can't prevent anybody making further
>> copies once they have recieved one.
>>  
>>
> If there was no GPL code in FreeBSD he could prevent anybody from 
> making copys of his copys, as long as he keeps the BSD copyright 
> notices in there etc he can do anything he wants with it, ANYTHING! 
> For example the Windows NT network stack was ripped from OpenBSD et. 
> al. Now if you ask me if it's a sane thing to do I'd say no because 
> they can just go around him and get it from the FreeBSD site. but the 
> point I'm trying to make is that he could if he wanted to, even if 
> it's a stupid idea such as this, because FreeBSD IS "free", unlike the 
> GPL.
>
duh, I forgot the best example. BSD running on a mach kernel running a 
custom user interface, otherwise known as Mac OS-X.



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