Re: [gNewSense-users] BSD code

[Peter and Jesse]

On Fri, 2008-25-04 at 20:01 +0200, Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> Peter and Jesse wrote:
> >> The copyright notice says "The Regents of the University of California" 
> >> (plural) so there might be more than one person you can contact?
> >>
> >> If we could find who put the update-statement in there we could ask that 
> >> person. The best thing I could find was 
> >> http://lxr.linux.no/linux-old+v2.4.0/drivers/net/bsd_comp.c, which shows 
> >> that the update was introduced in 2.4.0. Does anybody know of an easy 
> >> web front end to the kernel revision logs so that we can find the author 
> >> of the change?
> > 
> > Ooh, you're right. I contacted Paul Mackerras (paulus), but looking at
> > the old kernels, his time-stamped name is there before the license was
> > changed. Regarding the Regents of the University of California, they
> > would have been the copyright holders in the original license, so I
> > wouldn't think they would have anything to do with the problematic
> > introduction. However, if folks want, I can try to get a hold of the
> > appropriate people at the U of C.
> >  Peter
> > 
> 
> Well, the automatic change from original BSD license to modified BSD 
> license applied to all code originating from Berkeley. So if they can 
> confirm that this code is theirs and that it now falls under the 
> modified BSD license then we can give the OK on this code and ask 
> upstream to make the update statement more clear (copyright -> license, 
> add reference to license change, explain module-only restriction).

Now I'm a little confused. Is the issue here the ambiguity of the
update-statement, or whether the code is from the original UCB code base
or not?
http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Kernel/Ubuntu-hardy-linux-2-6-24-12-22--drivers--net--bsd-comp-c
 clearly says that the code is from the source code from the compress program 
from 4.3BSD. Can't we take his word for it? Although  
http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Kernel/Ubuntu-hardy-linux-2-6-24-12-22--drivers--isdn--i4l--isdn-bsdcomp-c
 does not say explicitly say where the code comes from, looking through the 
code I think it's pretty clear that it's that same compress program.
Regarding contacting upstream, it would be great for the
update-statement to be a lot clearer. Does anyone know who we would
contact? The kernel-devel list? I got a pretty curt response from paulus
(who, indeed, did not write the problematic update-statement).
Comments?
 Peter