BSD folks position on GPL, Novell, IBM, SCO, and MS...

[Mike Hauber]

i am by no means trolling here.  I just haven't heard much of anything from 
the BSD community on the subjects, and would like to know the general 
consensus.  Being that this is more of a support mailing list, if one could 
direct me to where I can ask this question appropriately, or if folks would 
reply only to my email addy, that would be fine, too.  Impositions here are 
not my intent.

I have been an avid user of the BSDs (mostly FreeBSD and OpenBSD), and have 
experimented with the Linuses for a good while now (Mainly Debian, RH, and 
SuSe).  I pretty much get it that the BSD folks and the Linux folks don't see 
eye-to-eye on licensing issues, but it seems to me that the overall attempt 
of both communities seems to be "get the code out there and keep it free."

I was just wondering what the general consensus was on the GPL, Linux in 
general, SCOs lawsuit, Sun's open sourcing, IBMs contributions to Linux, 
Novell's contributions, Novell's deal with MS and how this really affects 
SuSe (there's a lot of hype on that and I literally don't know what to 
believe at this point).

Being that most folks here would be in positions of having to deal with a 
variety of OSs and have in the past dealt with opposing forces at work, I 
figured there would be at least one or two educated folks I could gleen from.

Thanks, and sorry for the imposition,

Mike


PS...  One more question...  Being that Linux emulation is available as a port 
for the BSDs, I would assume (but haven't taken the time to research) that 
GPLd code is used.  If there comes to be issues with Linux, what would that 
mean for BSDs compatibility in regards to emulation?