ASL 2.0 based software contribution to FreeBSD code base

[Vincent Hoffman]

Saifi Khan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Vincent Hoffman <vince at unsane.co.uk> wrote:
>   
>> Saifi Khan wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Is Apache Software License (ASL) 2.0 based software contributions
>>> accepted in FreeBSD code base ?
>>>
>>> Specific case to consider would be:
>>>  a. device driver code released under ASL 2.0
>>>  b. code contributed to kernel (eg. scheduler implementation) under ASL 2.0
>>>  c. code contributed to userland (eg. new implementation of ctags) under ASL 2.0
>>>
>>> Can some of the experienced members share how things work within the
>>> context of FreeBSD project ?
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> I was going to answer with
>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/pref-license.html
>> however in a recent discussion on the -current list
>> (http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=163526+0+current/freebsd-current)
>> Brooks Davis <brooks at freebsd.org> said
>> "This file is outdated.  While this remains our prefered license, the
>> current
>> OpenBSD prefered license is the ISC licesed which is allowed by the license
>> policy we published to developers last year.  We should probably replace
>> this
>> page with that policy."
>>
>> I'd ask for a copy of the current policy on freebsd-current@ if you dont
>> get any answers here.
>>
>>
>>     
>
> Hi Vince:
>
> Thank you for your kind reply.
>
> Please see my writeup on ASL at http://www.twincling.org/node/277
>
> While i understand ASL, i'm keen to know what are the technical
> deviations (if any) in the BSD  licsense followed by FreeBSD project.
>
> eg. if i write a device driver and release it under ASL 2.0, can it
> legally make into FreeBSD project ?
>
>   
I'm in no way a licence expert and I'm not a FreeBSD developer, however
my understanding (from sources such as
[http://wiki.freebsd.org/VendorInformation])
is that in answer to your original questions
a) Device drivers - yes but it cannot be included in the GENERIC config,
but thats what modules are for anyway.
b) Kernel/base system - No - I belive this would need to be BSD licensed.
c) userland - Yes but probably needs to be in the contrib directory

as an example, all the ZFS stuff is CDDL licenced , This had to be kept
separate from pretty much everything but it's there.
However I could well be wrong and its almost certainly worth asking
these questions again on the freebsd-current mailing list where
developers who might actually know the answers hang out.

Vince