Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Open Source Agreements
Author: Eric Kidd Posted: 8/21/2000; 10:27:07 PM Topic: A History of "Open Source" Msg #: 19911 (In response to 19909) Prev/Next: 19910 / 19912
I think this is a myth; I remember Alan Cox saying that it is not true,I did some more research. :-) There aren't very many FreeBSD copyrights in the Linux kernel, but there are a few. Here's one with Alan Cox's fingerprints on it:
The original Linux port was done Alan Cox, with changes/fixes from Pauline Middlelink, Jos Vos, Thomas Quinot, Wouter Gadeyne, Juan Jose Ciarlante, Bernd Eckenfels, Keith Owens and others.
Copyright from the original FreeBSD version follows:
Copyright (c) 1993 Daniel Boulet
Copyright (c) 1994 Ugen J.S.Antsilevich(If the above link ever breaks, you can also search for the word FreeBSD in the Linux source code.)
One Outage Has Been Fixed
the GPL and BSD licenses aren't even compatible.
Up until 1999, there was allegedly "a bug" in the University of California license. Some people believed this bug caused problems with the GPL; others disagreed.
This disagreement caused some pretty serious lossage. Many developers feared that the two most popular open source licenses were legally incompatible.
Stallman tells the whole story, including the happy ending:
Dean Hal Varian at the University of California took up the cause, and championed it with the administration. In June 1999, after two years of discussions, the University of California removed this clause from the license of BSD.So we can thank Dean Varian for repairing this particularly annoying outage.
Cheers,
Eric
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