Re: viral license free fork of freebsd

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Tim Kientzle wrote:

>> It's not clear this is comprehensive, but it may still be useful in 
>> discussing replacing GPL'd components with non-GPL'd ones:
>>
>>   http://wiki.freebsd.org/ContribSoftware
>
> Should we add a column indicating possible alternatives?

Certainly.

> For example, I'm working on a new cpio now, Kai Wang is working on binutils, 
> and I'm sure there are other projects in the works.
>
> I agree with other folks who have picked out GNU readline as probably the 
> most troublesome.  The other GPL-licensed tools are generally separate 
> applications that could be fairly easily dropped from any particular 
> application (embedded applications probably don't need to distribute gdb or 
> gcc, for instance).

For embedded systems, a non-GPL gdbserver might be useful.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge