A Wizard of Earth C writes:
|
| [... tons of cogent explication ...]
|
| Finally, it has been pointed out that not having a "good" math emulator
| neither prevents an individual from using the code themselves without
| endorsement by any group, nor does it do anything worse than require
| particular (and ubiquitious) hardware in the non-use case.  Lack of
| the feature as a "checkbox item" -- ie: an item which serves only as
| a discriminator in the absence of all other distinctions -- only
| encourages the developement of an endorsable alternative without
| penalizing anything other than the convenience of third party system
| integrator (who could include the code, write an alternative, or require
| the hardware themselves).
| 
| I am against inclusion of the emulator in the default distributions
| under the current terms.  [...] I feel the terms are too
| restrictive, and that they do not accurately reflect the spirit of
| the UCB copyright, Net/2, CSRG, *BSD, or myself. 

OK.  There's lots of principled opposition to this copyright+license.

Are there any cases in which someone cannot boot *BSD because they
have an inadequate math emulator?

If not, then we can (as was suggested earlier in this thread) take the
emulator, GPL and all, and make the necessary changes for it to run
with *BSD along with the necessary recipe for *BSD to run with it, and
offer it from both sun-lamp and freebsd.  What people link in the
privacy of their own homes cannot be any of our business...

The changes get folded back into the main release of the emulator, we
have no support headaches, and we can get back to our work with warm
thoughts of what great people we are for having made this technology
avilable to the coprocessor-impaired... :-)

A show of hands?  I have sent this to hackers@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu
to get their input as well.


Erick

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