On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 03:20:14AM +0200, Rhialto wrote:
> On Fri 01 Sep 2006 at 22:36:01 -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > We have repeatedly been the victims of a particularly ugly kind of
> > rumormongering, specifically claims that NetBSD is "tainted", contains
> > source code we are not entitled to distribute, or so forth.  It is an
> > unfortunate fact that for many years we could not effectively respond
> > to those claims (which were false) because our agreement with the owners
> > of the Unix source code, which required us to remove certain files that
> > had been distributed by Berkeley in Net2 and 4.4BSD, had a binding
> > confidentiality clause.
> 
> "Our" agreement? It was between between USL and The Regents of the
> University of California [...]

Your statement quoted above is wrong.  NetBSD existed well before the
lawsuits between USL and the Regents were settled, was contacted by
the parties' attorneys at the time of the settlement, and reached an
agreement with USL to remove the same files Berkeley did from our own
distribution.

But this agreement has a confidentiality clause, which meant that for
many years as various people spread nonsense about NetBSD being "tainted"
we were not able to respond.  So it is very important to ensure that there
is no question about such things in the future, and this is, of course,
why we must document that all of the code in our repository is proper,
which requires developers to execute agreements stating so.

-- 
  Thor Lancelot Simon	                                     tls@rek.tjls.com

  "We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral
   aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others."      - H.L.A. Hart