MIPS Processor ISA To Be Open-Sourced In 2019

[starshipeleven]

the BSD licence DOES allow you to change the licence of your own product (it's the GPL that doesn't),

Wrong again. You can always change the license of your own product, even with GPL.

It's just that you can't change it retroactively i.e. all the code out there licensed as GPL or BSD or in some other commercial license will remain licensed like that.

And of course you can't change it if it's not 100% your own product (i.e. if you have accepted contributions) unless you get clearance from the contributors themselves (the copyright holders of their contribution), or had the contributors sign an agreement that assigns you copyright over their contribution, aka Canonical CLA or Qt's contributor agreements, also KDE does this.

and Minix didn't use the BSD licence in the early 1990s.

It had a commercial license that did not allow to redistribute it as it was sold for 50 bucks or something.

[Tomin]

Linux still contains a Minix FS driver. I don't know if that has been rewritten from scratch but for some reason I doubt anyone bothered. But otherwise you are right in that there is no Minix code left in Linux today, which is is why I said that Linux *started* as a fork of Minix (and then evolved totally separately). It's like Apache which started, IIRC, as a fork of the old NCSA web server. That's were its name comes from, by the way: "a patch - apache".

I don't think Linux ever contained any Minix code. Minix's license back then just didn't allow it. Also those file systems (Minix and fat) were much simpler than what we have nowadays. I'm pretty sure Linux's implementation was written from scratch. There are copyright statements from 1991 by Linus in there.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/fs/minix

[starshipeleven]

Linux still contains a Minix FS driver.

A filesystem driver is hardly enough to claim Linux is a fork of MINIX, it's a self-contained module.

[Markore]

Sorry what? You can't change the license of a work unless you are the copyright holder, and BSD license forces you to keep the original copyright owner in all files and make it clear also if you ship compiled code.

That is precisely what BSD licensed code allows you to do.
Just help yourself and include it in your project, however licensed... No need to worry about copyrights, fully liberal FreeBSD license is there to help you get the code and use it however you want.

I mean, that's the only thing the BSD license enforces man, "don't delete the fucking copyright notice".

What that means is that BSD is actually non-license. Everyone can behave like there is no license at all. Providing "notice" does not force one to provide source code , e.g. it is not the copyleft license. So it is very funny to call it a license at all.
As seen on PlayStation 4 example with using FreeBSD, I wonder if they reproduce a notice anywhere and what is use of reproducing it, anyhow.
(yes I know - relieving previous contributors from responsibility if code actually works )

One thing you avoid to mention, is that there are people, liking it the way it is, and that not having strong copyleft is not a problem for their contribution to the BSD* projects.
Similarly, License for illumos Opensolaris continuation distributions is CDDL, that also as BSD allows linking with all other differently licensed code, but CDDL is a Copyleft license. (So no GPL "stickiness" limitation).

And back on the topic (!), as seen on OpenSPARC example, nothing new about Free software-licensed Chip hardware definitions, but much more is needed to have a productive community then just releasing CPU hardware definitions.

[starshipeleven]

That is precisely what BSD licensed code allows you to do.

No it does not allow to change the license, we were SPECIFICALLY talking about changing the license because Linux is GPLv2 licensed. If Linux was a MINIX fork then someone has changed the license. BSD does NOT and has NEVER allowed anyone to change the license of the work.

Just help yourself and include it in your project, however licensed... No need to worry about copyrights, fully liberal FreeBSD license is there to help you get the code and use it however you want.

Go preach the beauty of BSD license elsewhere.

What that means is that BSD is actually non-license. Everyone can behave like there is no license at all. Providing "notice" does not force one to provide source code , e.g. it is not the copyleft license. So it is very funny to call it a license at all.

No you cannot behave like there is no license.

No license means 100% rights reserved for the copyright owner. Do you even know what a license is? How copyright law works?

As seen on PlayStation 4 example with using FreeBSD, I wonder if they reproduce a notice anywhere and what is use of reproducing it, anyhow.

Yes they always had some kind of menu where it's shown, there is also in the online documentation https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps4-oss/index.html

The use of reproducing it is to clearly state that it's not theirs and that it is used according with its license.

One thing you avoid to mention, is that there are people, liking it the way it is, and that not having strong copyleft is not a problem for their contribution to the BSD* projects.

Ok, I need to amend the original statement:
Because people are stupid and it didn't yet backfire horribly by pure chance (not all projects matter enough to be a target). Does not make it a good idea. Next question.

[Tomin]

No it does not allow to change the license, we were SPECIFICALLY talking about changing the license because Linux is GPLv2 licensed. If Linux was a MINIX fork then someone has changed the license. BSD does NOT and has NEVER allowed anyone to change the license of the work.

Sorry to interrupt, but this makes it sound like Minix was originally BSD licensed which is not true. It wasn't even free software when Linux was born. Just clarifying so that no one would think otherwise.

[euler271]

Linux still contains a Minix FS driver. I don't know if that has been rewritten from scratch but for some reason I doubt anyone bothered. But otherwise you are right in that there is no Minix code left in Linux today, which is is why I said that Linux *started* as a fork of Minix (and then evolved totally separately). It's like Apache which started, IIRC, as a fork of the old NCSA web server. That's were its name comes from, by the way: "a patch - apache".

You can read Linus' book 'Just for Fun', there all the story is told very clearly. He bought Minix, because he didnt want to use DOS in his new 386, some australian guy made a patch to expand the original capabilities of the OS, for it to stop being a toy OS basically. Then, after a while, he started writing a terminal emulator to work from home and being able to connect to the Unix system on the university. After a while, he added so many features to it, that he started referring to it as his 'GNU Emacs of terminal emulators'. One 'terrible' day, he destroyed his Minix installation by mistake (your typical dd-like operation gone wrong), and he had to make a decision; either re-install Minix or bite the bullet and accept that was he was doing was an operating System in the makings. Now we know that he chose the latter. (Because he started his terminal emulator on Minix, one of the first things developed was a Minix fs driver to be able to read his disks.)

[mparnaudeau]

Yeah, MIPS is relatively common in cheap embedded stuff like house routers and similar. POWER's lower end is still serious businness appliance hardware (router/firewall/whatever).

IBM have produced great high end POWER processors. Companies like Raptor helps to enlarge a developer community.
I dream about a next step that would adopt a top-to-bottom strategy to reinvest the embedded market (and create a kind of continuity from where NXP stopped). ARM did the opposite, having a market with small processors and improved them to open new markets to them.