Re: Interest from the FreeBSD camp

[ctooley@xxxxxxxx]

Loadable modules (as in the case of a filesystem) are not "part" of the kernel
directly.  Therefore Solaris wouldn't have to be GPL'd.  At least that's my
understanding ot it.

Chris Tooley







james rich <james.rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on 06/13/2001 12:19:53 PM
                                                              
                                                              
                                                              
  To:          "Nathan J. Mehl" <memory@xxxxxxxxx>            
                                                              
  cc:          Russell Cattelan <cattelan@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Eric  
               Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxx>, Juha Saarinen       
               <juha@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,                           
               linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx(bcc: Chris Tooley/AMOA)  
                                                              
                                                              
                                                              
  Subject      Re: Interest from the FreeBSD camp             
  :                                                           
                                                              






On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Nathan J. Mehl wrote:

> expect that if Sun thought they could gain some sort of competetive
> advantage from shipping Solaris 9 with XFS, they'd simply go ahead and
> do so with the existing GPL code.

Since XFS integrates with the OS they would have to GPL Solaris (I think)
- not likely.  With a BSD compatible license (such as would be required to
make it into the *BSDs) Sun (or anyone else) could take the XFS code,
modify it to work for them (and potentially not work for you - see
MicroSoft and kerberos) and then sell the result *without helping SGI in
any way*.  So SGI loses contributors to it's code and gains a competitor
using its own filesystem!

James Rich
james.rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx