FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:44:39 -0500
From: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sgi.com>
To: Ian Cooper <ian@WPI.EDU>
Cc: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: XFS and NetBSD

This has been discussed a few times on this list, and I'm sure Russell
will chime in as well... :)

But the bottom line is usually that it would cost SGI time, money and
lawyers to relicense the code, and unless there is a compelling business
reason to do so (i.e. perceived financial gain for SGI - or at least no
financial loss), it probably won't happen.  Getting XFS released under
the GPL was a herculean effort in the first place, and getting it
re-licensed would re-visit a lot of that effort.

I can't speak officialy for SGI in this matter (probably no-one on this
list can), but it's highly unlikely that SGI will spend the resources
necessary to make a change like this.

I know that sounds like corporate-speak, and I know how frustrating it
can be, I've been on the other end of it for some projects I was
interested in - but it's probably the reality today.

-Eric

Ian Cooper wrote:
>
> There is some interest in the BSD community to work on porting the XFS
> filesystem to the BSD platform (primarily for the sgimips port of NetBSD).
> However, there are licensing issues related with that.  BSD and its
> derivatives are licensed with a BSD licence (not suprisingly) and the
> Linux-XFS source code is licensed under the GPL.
>
> If a BSD port of XFS was to be integrated into the BSD kernel (NetBSD, in
> this case), then the source code would have to be relicensed for that use.
> Is this possible, and if so, how?


-- 
Eric Sandeen      XFS for Linux     http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs
sandeen@sgi.com   SGI, Inc.