logoalt Hacker News

Matl • today at 1:01 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Unless they modify it, the GPL really doesn't impact them. AFAIK FSF considers most BSD/MIT style licences to be compatible. It's the other way around where things gets stuck. Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.


Replies

brewmarche • today at 1:46 PM

> Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

The parts of Linux that get integrated into BSDs should not be GPL-licensed, e.g. <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c339f4010dea8b0d754f8...> and its siblings use MIT.

➕ show 1 reply
ninjin • today at 1:05 PM

Modification is the whole point of open source: "Unless you want to modify Windows, the closeness does not impact you". If you want to learn about how NetBSD looks at things, there is this page:

https://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html

As for being compatible. Yes, FSF considers anything permissive to be compatible with their family of licenses. However, it is a one-way relationship in that permissive code can be freely used by GPL projects, but not the other way around as using GPL code would impose further restrictions compared to a permissive license.