On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 01:04:50PM +0100, Erik Wikstr?m wrote: > On 2006-11-18 12:02, Antonio Vargas wrote: > Well, there is a difference between copyright-law and patent-law. The > code is protected by GPL (which is not compatible with BSD-licenses, and > I doubt that we'll ever see any GPL in the kernel). The algorithm (or > technique or whatever) is protected by a patent and you need a special > license to use it, which, as far as I know, IBM have not given to anyone > but Linux.
Much of the code is copyrighted by IBM, yes, but it doesn't matter since the way dfBSD deals with things is different and those portions are going to have to be rewritten anyways. It's not particularly hard to do so. The header file that contains the data structure APIs for list handling doesn't have a copyright header at all. The patent issue is another thing entirely. bill
