Once again, I'm not an intellectual property lawyer - I just speak from
experience involving incompatibilities between the two licenses.  Take
what I say with a grain of salt.


On Mon, 9 Dec 1996, Bill Studenmund wrote:

> > On Mon, 9 Dec 1996, Christopher R. Bowman wrote:
> [using *BSD stuff in GPL'd code]
> > It may be perfectly valid, but it's prohibited.  :-)
> 
> One thing I learned about all this is that you can BUILD it, you
> just can't distribute it. FreeBSD has a gnu section of their source. They
> don't distribute kernels with such things turned on, but you can make them.

Hmm...  interesting.  It sounds questionable to me, although I'm sure they
must have their justification.  I do know that you must comply with the
license if you modify the code of a GPL'ed program; whether or not 
building a "mixed" kernel like this constitutes a breach of the license,
I don't know.


> I thought (and would be happy to be corrected if wrong) that the problem was
> really that the code comes with a list of conditions under which you can
> distribute derived works, and keeping the original conditions is one of
> the conditions. The conditions aren't GPL, thus to GPL them you are changing
> the re-distribution conditions, which is not permitted.

Mostly correct.  If you are to include from other sources, the
restrictions in the orignial license for that code must be a subset of
those in the GPL; if not, you are imposing additional restrictions on
redistribution, which are verboten under the GPL. 


> Note: lkm's (or klm's) are fair game! If the linking is run-time, not
> build-time, you CAN mix GPL'd and non-GPL'd code. FSF folks were asked
> this question directly. I think the idea is they are only joined while running
> on your computer.  As long as you don't distribute the innards of your
> running computer, you're fine.

Also true.  The Linux sources come with a loadable module for BSD
compression of PPP links.  The module is under a BSD copyright, but the
sources and binary are distinct from those of the kernel as a whole, so
there are no problems.


> Also, the microkernel is NOT under the GPL, only the Linux server. :-)

Which explains why the snippets of MacBSD code are only confined to the
microkernel (in the ADB/keyboard code), and not the server.

							Rob

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