At 20:46 Uhr +0100 01.11.1998, Allen Briggs wrote:
>I don't know if there's any push to support ELF for m68k on NetBSD.
>I think there was some desire for this at one time, though.

I think the force behind ELF is the desire to support cross-builds (Bill
can probably say more about that). AFAIK, the GNU toolchain still has no
support for BSDish a.out shared libs. Apart from that, a.out seems to
satisfy all the needs of m68k - things may be different for newer processor
architectures.

>> And then, there's always the licensing issue...
>
>One solution might be to make the booter completely public domain.  I
>don't know if the current authors would go for that, but I think that
>license type is acceptable to both NetBSD and Linux projects.

It would be more of a religious issue, and therefore, of course, not so
easy. ;)

As a standalone application, a GPLed booter wouldn't hurt *BSD in any way -
there is plenty of GPLed stuff in the distribution, starting with gcc.

And neither would a BSD style copyrighted booter hurt L*nux/m(ac)68k, as
the L*nux distributions have plenty of *BSD stuff in them, although the
L*nux advocates don't talk about that much.

And after all, the m68k based desktop machines are way past commercial
relevance, giving m68k ports a weak position in both camps (can you say:
"byte order and ext2fs"?). So, maybe we should leave the licensing issues
to the i386 people.

Still, the idea of a a GPLed booter for MacBSD has a strange taste for me,
but that is nothing more than a personal sentiment.

	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)