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

[P.U.Kruppa]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Mike Hauber wrote:

> 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?

I think there's a list called freebsd-advocacy at freebsd.org for 
non-technical discussions.


Regards,

Peter Ulrich Kruppa
Wuppertal
Germany