Duplicating code from NetBSD

Ed Maste emaste at freebsd.org
Wed Apr 30 19:13:32 UTC 2014


On 17 April 2014 09:00, Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Wiadomość napisana przez Abhishek Gupta (LIS) w dniu 17 kwi 2014, o godz. 03:01:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> Newbie question so please excuse the naivety. If someone were to copy a few functions from NetBSD in to their FreeBSD kernel mode drivers then is it still possible to submit the code in to the FreeBSD tree under the FreeBSD license? If not then would the community accept the copied code cleanly separated out in a file and licensed under the NetBSD license? Please let me know if there is an acceptable procedure to do this or if this is a complete NONO.
>
> It all depends on the license.  If the code is licensed under standard BSD
> license, then it's perfectly ok to commit it to FreeBSD.  In fact, a lot of things
> got ported from NetBSD, just grep for it in sources.

It sounds to me as if Abhishek is proposing copying functions from
NetBSD into a FreeBSD source file for their driver.  While there's
probably an acceptable way to do this (while maintaining the copyright
/ license text), it seems like it would be more awkward and confusing,
and also make future updates more difficult.  I'd recommend leaving
the code in separate files.

Abhishek, do you have a pointer to the functions you're interested in using?


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