Hello all, I am one of the (non-developer) members of the Haiku project (http://www.haiku-os.org) which is a desktop OS created independently from others. It's not based on either Linux or BSD, and the code is primarily licensed as MIT/BSD.
First of all, I beg you please not to destroy me for bringing such a controversial topic to your mailing list. As a FOSS community member myself, I understand how frustrating it can be :( The dilemma we have encountered, as we prepare for our first official alpha release is whether or not we can distribute the Haiku-ported ntfs-3g driver (which is currently residing in our repository) with Haiku without requiring all of Haiku itself to be released under the terms of GPL. Haiku's kernel, and much of the rest of the OS, is heavily designed to support the notion of loadable modules. Most of the drivers are implemented this way, including filesystems. Since Haiku has its own proprietary filesystem (BFS), it doesn't generally rely on any other filesystems for the core OS functionality, it only uses additional filesystems to facilitate interoperability for the users' benefit. It seems some time ago the ntfs-3g project was ported to Haiku as a kernel-mode filesystem. So far, it has always been "disabled" in our build system since it was classified as a "GPL addon" (we have a configure option to enable these if desired). The developers are now considering adding it to our default image since it is loaded by the system agnostically, and doesn't represent core functionality of the OS. The general desire is that including it should not necessarily require Haiku's kernel to be distributed under the terms of GPL. We do realize this particular issue is often debated due to the definition of "linking", and we felt it was more important to contact the developers of ntfs-3g to get their opinion rather than make a determination purely on our own. Keep in mind that none of Haiku's codebase is closed source at all, but instead under the permissive, and GPL-friendly, MIT/BSD license - thus the Haiku project can certainly abide by the terms of the GPL if required. The primary worry in this case is that releasing Haiku, or even its kernel under terms of the GPL could subsequently force other 3rd-party developers creating software for Haiku to potentially also release their software under GPL. We do not want this restriction. And to further clarify, Haiku's developers do not despise GPL, it's simply that the target for Haiku was intended to be MIT/BSD and commercial-friendly. We have discussed other alternatives such as distributing these ported drivers as separately-installable packages that users can download manually, or even possibly offering two different versions of Haiku depending on what version is desired. Of course, there's also the possibility to eventually write our own NTFS driver (probably with only read support initially) as we've done with ext2/3 and FAT already. We also have a similar situation with our ReiserFS port which I'm going to follow up on next. As the original authors of the module involved here, your opinion matters to us. Thanks, Urias McCullough ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ ntfs-3g-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ntfs-3g-devel
