On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Ale Terlevich wrote:

>   There's one obvious difference.  Linux has the GPL, so we can't 
> distribute (i.e. use) any of their source in our kernels. 
>   Not really sure why, but that seems to be the upshot of it.

Yes.  The GPL forbids any redistribution that is under a "less free" (in
the FSF sense) licence.  The BSD licence _is_ less free, and so you cannot
use GPL'd code.  Conversely, the Linux community can't realistically use
any large amounts of BSD code, because to be distributed with the kernel
it would have to adhere to both the BSD and the GP licences, and that's
difficult to achieve in practice. 

>     Just a thought.  Would it be possible to distribute the source for
> loadable (I think) kernel modules (LKMs) with GPLd drivers separately 
> from the kernel distribution? 

There should be no problem with that as far as I can see.

phil