https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284783
--- Comment #1 from Warner Losh <i...@freebsd.org> --- TRW has had 30 years to object to the FreeBSD's project redistribution. There's no issue here. Any action would be prohibited by latches at this point (the legal concept that you have to enforce your rights promptly, and a 3 decade delay is not prompt). TRW provided the software to CMU to comply with CMU's license. CMU distributed this software with MACH from which FreeBSD picked it up. That license is clear: Copyright (c) 1991,1990,1989 Carnegie Mellon University All Rights Reserved. Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its documentation is hereby granted, provided that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of the software, derivative works or modified versions, and any portions thereof, and that both notices appear in supporting documentation. CARNEGIE MELLON ALLOWS FREE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IN ITS "AS IS" CONDITION. CARNEGIE MELLON DISCLAIMS ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE. Carnegie Mellon requests users of this software to return to Software Distribution Coordinator or software.distribut...@cs.cmu.edu School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 any improvements or extensions that they make and grant Carnegie Mellon the rights to redistribute these changes. Since there's an EXPLICT statement this is to comply with the CMU license, and since that license requests that people give copies of their modifications to CMU for redistribution, any ambiguity is TRW's grant must be read in that context. So the provanance of this code is: CMU makes Mach TRW modifies Mach and gives the code back to CMU CMU releases it with a new release of Mach Julian Elischer takes that code and puts it into 386BSD patch kit FreeBSD picks it up from 386BSD when it was created from the 386 patch kit Justin Gibbs retained this software in CAM when it was created. Somewhere along that chain, some of these details were omitted. Also, the 90s wasn't a great time for pedantic complaince with licenses and/or documentation so minor ambiguities like this have persisted for a long time. Which fraction of the file does mfiutil depend on? A git blame will tell you whether this license is even relevant: It's only relevant to the exact code that was retained in the fine step of the above. scsi_all.h has been 95% rewritten since FreeBSD 1.0, so even though the comment states 'Largely written by' that hasn't been true since the mid 2000s if my reading of git blame is correct (though our git tree only goes back to 2.0 and the details of history of the creation of FreeBSD from 386BSD is a bit convoluted due to the sloppiness of the import that was trying to be clean but accidentally fell short (and that shortfall is difficult to correct in CVS or even get right in CVS). Given this history, I think that the Debian FTP master is being overly pedantic based on a fractional preservation of history in the comments of this file. It's unclear, though, if copies of MACH survive to prove the code flow. But given that Julian wrote it for TRW and then put it into 386BSD while he still worked for them and did both contributions through their legal depart, I don't think there's any way this is a problem from that perspective (though my knowledge of this is from a BSDcan from a while ago when he was complaining about CAM, as confirmed later when I worked with him at Fusion I/O...). -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
