[ On , December 9, 1998 at 22:46:01 (-0800), Chris G. Demetriou wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: sendmail licensing again
>
> If we do go with it, we should work rather hard to make sure that it
> (and programs with licenses not unlike it, e.g. vixie cron, that are
> nothing like the 'standard BSD license') is (are) segregated from the
> code which has a 'standard-ish' license, just as the GPL'd bits are
> segregated.

I hope you are being facetious.

I think that segregating code into separate areas just because of
licensing restrictions, especially if those restrictions are as
innocuous to the non-commercial "user", is rather silly and pointless
exercise.

It makes the build system more difficult to implement and debug.  It
even makes reading the code more difficult in some cases.  I.e. it's not
a technically clean solution.

Partly integrating some things, segregating others, and not even
touching some other things, just because of licensing makes for an
un-wholly (sic!) mess.  If segregation is the way to go then NetBSD
should join FreeBSD in moving every piece of code that didn't originate
with CSRG (or the foundation) into a totally separate "contrib"
directory.  (At least I think FreeBSD is still doing this and I don't
like it!  I really *do* like the idea of the '*2netbsd' scripts...)

> Really, the NetBSD project should be doing a better job of providing
> NetBSD providers (a.k.a. some "NetBSD project customers") a canonical
> list of licensing-related information for all files/packages in the
> source tree, along the lines of what the Shark developers at DEC tried
> to compile for the bits we shipped.

I agree with this though.  A complete collection of licenses in the
documentation, along with a canonical list of files covered by each
license would be a good thing to have.

This would even be a good first step to being able to reduce the
intellectual property notification in each file to a single line or two
that points at the appropriate license.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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