Licensing [was Re: Emulated VAX build done!]

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> Why are we working with old versions of NetBSD?
>> [...] I don't run anything past 5.2 on my own machines for licensing
>> reasons.
> Ooo... what kind of licensing reasons??

That's the point at which core, or board, or whoever made the decision,
let GPLv3 code into the tree.  I've tried to read that license three
times, and people tell me I've still missed significant chunks.

If I can't figure out the license, it's not appropriate for my use no
matter _what_ it actually ends up permitting - in short, in my opinion
(and certainly for my purposes) it's too complex to be appropriate for
open-source work.

There are two reasons this made me drop the whole system: (1) it means
I no longer can trust NetBSD's licensing choices to be appropriate for
my use in general, so any version jump means reading all the licenses
in the tree; even with automated assist extracting and deduping
licenses, this substantially increases the (time-&-effort) costs of a
version jump; and (2) the component I saw being GPLv3ed was the
compiler, and a system with no compiler is of no practical use to me.

Thus, I haven't used NetBSD past 5.2 except (1) for work, where it's
work's neck, not mine, on the putative copyright-infringement line, and
(2) indirectly, such as receiving mail via the netbsd.org lists.

It's possible other problematic licenses exist in even the 5.2 tree.
If I ever discover one, I'll remove/replace the affected component or
back off to even older versions.  So far I have not found any and have
considered the risk acceptable.

> I take pride in making sure that all of (including my retro) systems
> only run while properly licensed.  Is there something that (new-ish)
> list members should know about?

Well, if you're willing to trust NetBSD's choice of what's acceptable
for licensing, and you consider GPLv3 in particular acceptable,
probably not.  (I suspect that includes all but one - me - of the
listmembers; I've never even heard of anyone who agrees with my stance
on this point.  I don't know whether most people _can_ figure out
GPLv3, or are willing to trust NetBSD and/or the FSF enough, or just
don't care about making sure they follow the licenses, or what.
Probably at least a little of each.)

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