Somebody from Be contacted me about this, and they seem to be very much
willing to do the right thing. The person suggested on his own that
they make the boot sources available along with a way or "relinking"
them to the BeOS kernel, which should make the GPL happy, in fact (the
16-bit boot-code isn't actually "linked" to the kernel, it's more of an
aggregate, although this is approaching being a gray area).
I further suggested that they (a) give credit where credit is due and
(b) sign a paper saying that they haven't copied anything else from
Linux. The (b) thing I wanted just to make sure that they don't get the
feeling that taking the bootloader "dilutes" the GPL in any way for the
rest of the kernel.
So from my emails with this one BeOS person, I got the strong impression
that they never tried to do anything immoral, or that they want to
flaunt the GPL. I'd like to wait for them to execute on this, but I'd
also like for people to not consider them too guilty right now. I think
the discussion has been good so far in that it obviously prompted the
BeOS people to contact me, but it also appears that they are trying to
do the right thing (and from the tone of the discussions I had, it
wasn't that they felt pressured into doing the right thing, but that
they had done the wrong thing without really thinking about it).
Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu