distrubuting distro

[Nikolas Britton]

Erik Trulsson wrote:

>On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 07:11:36AM -0600, Nikolas Britton wrote:
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>>Nikolas Britton wrote:
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>>>Erik Trulsson wrote:
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>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>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.
>>>
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>>>
>>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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>With the "BSD running on a mach kernel" part also known as Darwim,
>which is freely distributable under pretty much the same conditions as
>the other BSDs.
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Yep, but they did not have to do that. It was a gesture of giving back 
to the community that which they took from it. You would have to be 
morally corrupt to take other peoples life work and not think you should 
give something back to them, even if it is free and has no strings attached.

Umm and about BSD in windows. It is in there, open the binary network 
(ping, ftp, telnet, finger, etc.) commands in a text editor and you can 
view the BSD copyright notices. also SFU (services for unix) version 3.5 
was almost an entire rip of OpenBSD, and no thay did not give any kick 
backs to the community.