I called Rick Moen's attention to this thread, since I believe him to
be well-versed in the current state of Linux, and forever interested in
license questions. Here's his response, reposted here (fwiw, ymmv) with
his permission:

--- snip ---

Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 12:24:16 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: Bob Bernstein <bernstein@cesmail.net>
Subject: Re: architecture wars?

Quoting Bob Bernstein (bernstein@cesmail.net):

> Check out these messages in netbsd-advocacy. I particularly liked uwe's
> reply...
> 
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2003/10/18/0000.html
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2003/10/18/0001.html

I like that, too.  For one thing, I likewise stay the hell away from
advocacy.  For another, by coincidence I happen to have inherited a
document that includes a list of all Linux-supported CPU architectures:


http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO.html

  Linux User Group HOWTO
  Rick Moen
  v1.7.0, 2003-10-14

  The Linux User Group HOWTO is a guide to founding, maintaining, and
  growing a Linux user group, co-authored by Kendall Clark and Rick
Moen
  (now maintained by Rick Moen).

The thing was unmaintained for five years, after Kendall dropped it,
and
people were complaining about it, so I adopted it after Kendall asked
me
to.   The shiny-happy boosterism tone bugged me, so I amply dosed it
with vinegar in a number of new sections I wrote specifically to fix
that.  But also, one of the things that bugged me was a supremely lame
section 1.1 that listed what CPU architectures Linux worked on -- but
the listing would have been incomplete and inaccurate even six years
ago. 

Inevitably, as uwe points out, lists of supported architecture tend to
be a bit silly:  Many of them will inevitably be lagging or utterly 
impractical.  I mean, running *ix on a PalmPilot is a neat trick, but
really.  Whether a port exists says nothing at all about whether you'd
actually want to run it, and I'd _much_ rather run NetBSD than anything
else on a whole bunch'a architectures.

Anyhow, I figured that if there's going to be a silly list of supported
CPUs in the Linux User Group HOWTO, it at least ought to be _grandly_
silly.	So, I rounded up every Linux CPU port that everyone has ever
done, and threw them all into listings by machine category:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO-1.html

One of these days, I'll supplement that with hyperlinks to maintainer
pages (if any) for each of those ports.

Anyhow, it's possible that mine is -- for all its silliness -- the best
single-stop listing of known Linux ports (even though I still have to
add a bunch of these new embedded-hardware ports).  For whatever (very
tiny) amount that's worth.

You're more than welcome to lob this post back to netbsd-advocacy with
my friendly wave.  I'm off to help run SVLUG's Linux installfest --
with, as always, my ftp.iastate.edu NetBSD CDs in addition to my Linux
distros.

-- 
Cheers, 			   Why, yes, _of course_ I'm an
elitist.   
Rick Moen			   Isn't everyone?		
rick@linuxmafia.com

-- snip ---


-- 
Bob Bernstein