Re: NOS is evil

[jmorriso@bogomips.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison)]

[ dislaimer: I should have said this earlier: I'm not trying to piss
  on NOS; NOS is useful and will continue to be useful within a certain
  *context* ]
> 
> Phil Karn KA9Q wrote,
> > Amen. Hear hear...
> 
> Phil, you've said many times that you'd like us to move off of NOS
> and onto a real operating system.
> 
> You could help out by releasing your code under the GPL or at least
> a Berkeley-style copyright, so that we could put fragments of it into
> Linux or BSD without licensing hassles.

Phil doesnt need to put much under a GPL or Berkeley copyright: BSD,
Linux etc. already have TCP/IP written for them. But he's probably not
going to make any money off the AX25 stuff and various BBS bits and
pieces. There are some parts of NOS that weren't written by him, so
other authors would need to be contacted too.

But there's nothing stopping hams from porting the software and using
it, as long as it's for ham radio or educational purposes. Nobody else
would want NetROM etc. anyway. What's nice about a BSD style license
is that it won't need any special handling by people who publish CDs
and disks. If there's confusion on the licensing, it won't get
included in any form, which makes it hard to get it out to the average
ham.

So find the pieces of code that are useful to developing AX.25 etc.
code for BSD or Linux, and then ask Phil about the licensing. He's
changed lincensing terms in the past: ask Russel Nelson/Crynwr about
the SLIP packet driver.

> 
> 

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