licensing question APSL

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Volker wrote:

> On 02/14/08 16:02, Brooks Davis wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 07:39:27AM +0100, Volker wrote:
>>> PRs in question: bin/67307 bin/67308
>>
>> The quotes on the followup are essentially correct except that explicit 
>> approval is required by core to add new Non-BSD-Licensed code and that 
>> there would need to be a mechanism to not build them as part of buildworld 
>> to allow environments that do not want to deal with the APSL to avoid it 
>> similar to GPL or CDDL code.
>
> thank you for your opinion on that. The PR followup stating the APSL license 
> is ok, has been the statement of the original PR submitter, so I don't trust 
> that in the first place. That's why I was asking here for that license if 
> there's a common agreement.
>
> So I can assume the APSL license is (still) generally accepted for the BSDs?
>
> If nobody complains about the APSL, I'll ping core for a green flag.

Two points here, although I think Brooks has already pretty much covered 
things from a FreeBSD perspective:

(1) While there is GPL/LGPL (and now CDDL) code in the FreeBSD base, that's
     only where there's a particular compelling technical reason to do so:
     for example, we need a C compiler.  However, there are on-going efforts to
     identify and replace non-BSD licensed code with BSD licensed code --
     recently this has included libarchive/bsdtar and it's spin-offs, such as
     the BSD-licensed unzip code, as well as the growing bsdelf tool
     collection.

(2) The other BSDs, as far as I'm aware, take similar or possibly more
     conservative views in this regard, with a strong preference for new
     components to be BSD-licensed and not fall under GPL (or other licenses).

I think it's a significant testament to the quality of the Solaris parts we've 
been pulling in (ZFS, DTrace) that CDDL parts are now in the base tree.  They 
are carefully marked and isolated to make it easy to build CDDL-free systems 
in the same way that you can build GPL-free systems.  I would anticipate that 
if any APSL code did come into the base, we'd need similar isolation.  To date 
we have had some luck in requesting Apple relicense APSL code to BSD though 
(and more recently Apache license) -- for example the Audit and OpenBSM code 
is Apple code now under a BSD license, which allows us to include it in the 
base and GENERIC kernel.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge