Hi, I am packaging the Mac-on-Linux emulator mol, which is itself GPLed. Recently, it has become capable of booting both Mac OS and Linux on its virtual machine and therefore was moved from contrib to main. Now the question has arisen whether some of the low-level drivers that mol includes should actually be in main. If I understand Samuel's (he is the upstream author) explanation correctly, their licenses fall in three categories:
1. GPL This is no problem at all of course and since Linux runs on top of this driver, the package will stay in main and non-free drivers will be moved to a separate package in non-free if necessary. 2. Apple Public Source License A number of drivers are adapted from Darwin and were released under the Apple Public Source License (APSL). More specifically, version 1.2 applies, which to my knowledge was certified as free, but a few posts on this list express doubts. What is the current situation on this? 3. no clear license Some drivers are based on example code that Apple supplies as a starting point for driver development. This was before the APSL, so Samuel believes it is possible to place them under a free license. Furthermore, to quote Samuel, | All the binaries above run within the MOL session and they are | coupled to MOL and the linux side through a syscall interface. | Running non-GPL code in this manner might slightly violate the mol | GPL license. Is this correct? What modifications to the mol license would be necessary to keep mol DFSG-free while allowing for non-free drivers to run? Thanks for any comments, Jens. -- J'qbpbe, le m'en fquz pe j'qbpbe! Le veux aimeb et mqubib panz je pézqbpbe je djuz tqtaj!
