FreeBSD Catching Up To Linux DRM Graphics Drivers, In Sync With Git

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Catching Up To Linux DRM Graphics Drivers, In Sync With Git

For the first time ever, the FreeBSD DRM drivers match the code of what's found in the upstream Linux kernel Git. They started off trailing many releases behind the state of the upstream Linux kernel, but as of now the Intel DRM as the first driver has made it to be in sync with the current Linux 4.8 development code...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-DRM-Matches-Git

[pal666]

next obvious step: throw away freebsd and just use linux

[Veto]

Will this effectively change the FreeBSD kernel from BSD license to GPL?

[rhavenn]

Nice job FreeBSD devs. I'll happily keep using FreeBSD over Linux and now I'll soon be able to get a newish laptop too.

No, this won't change the FreeBSD licensing at all. It installs as a module via the ports tree and there is a shim / translation layer to talk to the FreeBSD kernel.

[Luke_Wolf]

Will this effective change the FreeBSD kernel from BSD license to GPL?

Of course not. I don't have exact statistics on this point but much of the Linux Kernel actually isn't GPL, and instead permissively licensed, especially as regards drivers and driver infrastructure, which allows drivers to be shared between the Linux and BSD kernels. What is going on however is that Inifiniband's Open Fabric Alliance wrote a shim between the Linux driver interface and the FreeBSD driver interface that their driver sits ontop of, the FreeBSD graphics team looked at that, decided that they could use it to shim the graphics drivers, and pulled it out of the infiniband stack and turned it into linuxkpi, which has allowed them to jump to their current status.

[duby229]

Will this effective change the FreeBSD kernel from BSD license to GPL?

No, because the DRM drivers are licensed under a so called "permissive" license called MIT. It's GPL compatible when used with the linux kernel, but BSD compatible when used with FreeBSD.

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

It's a very simple agreement that that by using the word sublicense allows it to "take on" the license of the parent project.

[duby229]

EDIT: So yeah, if you are booted to a linux kernel all of that code is GPLv2 only. If you are booted up to a FreeBSD kernel all of that code is BSD. So the permissive license is only relevant in the context of that individual project where it is MIT. But in the context of the upstream linux kernel it is GPLv2 only. And in the context of the upstream FreeBSD kernel it is BSD.

[Luke_Wolf]

EDIT: So yeah, if you are booted to a linux kernel all of that code is GPLv2 only. If you are booted up to a FreeBSD kernel all of that code is BSD. So the permissive license is only relevant in the context of that individual project where it is MIT. But in the context of the upstream linux kernel it is GPLv2 only. And in the context of the upstream FreeBSD kernel it is BSD.

Well.... Almost... you're right for the Linux kernel, but anything that's not hard copyleft (such as GPL) doesn't have the situation where licenses subsume each other, so: GPL + BSD + MIT = GPL, but BSD+MIT = BSD + MIT. It's most correct to say that in the context of the FreeBSD kernel it retains it's original license.

[robclark]

Will this effective change the FreeBSD kernel from BSD license to GPL?

most of the drm code is dual licensed

[xeekei]

I wish filesystems where dual-licensed as well.