• cqst@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    8·
    1 month ago

    but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)?

    HyperbolaBSD is a hard fork, that relicenses the OpenBSD kernel as GPL (as permitted by permissive licenses.)

    HyperbolaBSD has already dug into the OpenBSD source tree and discovered numerous licensing issues.

    https://git.hyperbola.info:50100/~team/documentation/todo.git/tree/openbsd_kernel-file-list-with-license-issues.md

    HyperbolaBSD will be a truly libre distro that takes advantage of copyleft, while moving away from the major issues Linux is stepping into too.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Ah, that’s different then!

      Hmm…

      From https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:manual:contrib:hyperbolabsd_faq:

      HyperbolaBSD is under a progressive migration by replacing all non GPL-compatible code. It will be replaced with new compatible code under Simplified BSD License. We do this in order to incorporate GPL code from other projects such as ReactOS, as well new code from scratch.

      It’s not clear to me that relicensing the existing code to GPL is what they’re planning on doing; it sounds more like they’re going to mix in GPL code but not change the existing files to GPL en masse after they finish harmonizing them to two-clause BSD.

      Frankly, IMO that’s too bad: I’d love to see them make the whole shebang GPLv3-or-later

      Related question: is all Linux kernel code required to be licensed GPLv2-only, or are individual contributions allowed to be GPLv2-or-later? I’d be nice to see if that project (and stuff like HURD and ReactOS) could benefit from at least some Linux contributions, even if they can’t copy it wholesale.