Hello; Just thought I'd bring the old subject of FreeBSD's Dtrace licensing issue again:
According to the FreeBSD developer that ported it (RIP): "If I add CDDL code to FreeBSD's generic kernel and ship the binary, I change the license from one that is purely BSD to include CDDL clauses. I am told by the FreeBSD community that isn't acceptable. So I am not allowed to do it." I may be misinterpreting but it would seem like just adding a #include to CDDL code will make all the file CDDL'd too. This is the idea behind "copyleft", and while it is respectable and serves a purpose, this doesn't really work well for headers. FreeBSD has a project proposal to try to avoid the CDDL in order to ship a working Dtrace with the kernel: http://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage#head-18730945e29664d263fda697f5bc95fbe52d6271 Unfortunately this would also take FreeBSD into an obscure patent ground and it wouldn't be acceptable for either Oracle or FreeBSD. I would like to suggest an intermediate approach: can Oracle relicense the Dtrace headers (only) under the Apache Source license? http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html This is not copyleft but still keeps the patent protection. thanks in advance, Pedro. _______________________________________________ dtrace-discuss mailing list dtrace-discuss@opensolaris.org
