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- Pridružio: 17 Apr 2003
- Poruke: 3989
- Gde živiš: Novi Sad, Vojvodina
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Predrag Damnjanovic ::jel' ste vi sigurni da netbsd licenca dozvoljava da netbsd sors koristis u komercijalnim closed source aplikacijama?
nisam bas siguran...
znam da mozes neke opensource biblioteke za programiranje da koristis u komercijalnim closed source aplikacijama, ali to je druga prica, jer biblioteke i sluze za to...
ali za netbsd sors uopste ne bih rekao da mozes tek tako da ga uzmes... cak mislim da ne mozes ni za nekomercijalni opensource projekat da ga uzmes, a kamo li za komercijalan closed source projekat.
http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/redistribution.html
NetBSD's copyright and licensing terms:
For the most part, the software constituting the NetBSD operating system is not in the public domain; its authors retain their copyright. However, because the people working on the NetBSD Project are committed to providing a free operating system, the license terms that cover most of the Project's source code are relatively lenient. In general, developers pattern their license terms after what's known as the "Berkeley license." This license was used in the University of California, Berkeley's second Berkeley Networking Release and the 4.4BSD Lite software release, and looks like this:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of
California, Berkeley and its contributors.
4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.
The license is preceded by the copyright statement itself, and is followed by some disclaimer information, so that if someone has problems with the software the authors can't be held liable.
The Berkeley license is a rather liberal license. All it requires is that the author of the work be given due credit for their creation, and that their name not be used to promote products based on their work. It allows free distribution, as long as the terms are followed, and also allows people to modify the work and not distribute it, if they so choose. Some contributors also omit the third clause.
Though the Berkeley license is generally used as the template for the license terms of works that are part of the NetBSD source tree, it does not apply to all works in the source tree, and you should check the individual source files to see what license applies to them. In particular, certain parts of the source tree are covered by the GNU General Public License (also known as the GPL), which is very different from the Berkeley license. Though we would like all of the software that we distribute to be covered by a Berkeley-style license, we can't make other people change their license terms, and we don't have an infinite amount of time to rewrite all of the software that we need.
Why the NetBSD Project uses a Berkeley-style license:
The people working on the NetBSD Project want to provide a high-quality system that anyone can use for whatever they want. We're not in it for the money (we're volunteers!), so we've no desire to keep people from distributing our work. However, for various reasons, we'd like credit for the work that we do, and so neither do we want to place our work into the public domain, and thereby give up our claim to even having our names on the software we wrote! Berkeley-style licenses are a happy medium: they allow people to copy and modify the software, so long as we get name recognition and our names aren't used without our permissions.
One thing that some people don't realize about Berkeley-style licenses is that they allow licensees (the users of the licensed work) to sell the code, in any form, with or without modification, and that they make no requirement that licensees give away the source code, even if they're selling binaries. This provides a striking contrast to the license terms granted by the GNU General Public License, because the GPL requires that, if you're distributing binaries, you be willing to give away the sources to build those binaries.
Those of us working on the NetBSD Project are aware of this distinction, and some even value it. As stated above, we want anyone to be able to use the NetBSD operating system for whatever they want, just as long as they follow the few restrictions made by our license terms. Additionally, we don't think it's right to require people who add to our work and want to distribute the results (for profit or otherwise) to give away the source to their additions; they made the additions, and they should be free to do with them as they wish.
In summary, the people involved in the NetBSD Project use a Berkeley-style license where possible because it closely matches our goal of allowing users to do whatever they'd like with our software, while making sure that we get credit for the work we have done. We are pragmatic, however, and will include software with different license terms in the NetBSD operating system if it significantly improves the quality of the system.
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