The direction of malloc?

[Roland McGrath]

> In the past did we just ask the FSF for permission to use the 
> bind code? How hard was that process?

"The past" was a very long time ago and the process was not formalized at
all.  It was simply decided and approved by RMS that UCB as a copyright
holder with the canonical BSD terms was a sufficiently known quantity that
we'd use their code without assignment or disclaimer.  Later that was
extended to the ISC, DEC, and IBM copyrights in BIND code.  The decision
about Sun's copyright on the sunrpc code was similar.

You can consult FSF legal folks if you want, but it's likely that the first
line of people answering those queries now don't understand the history and
the big exceptions to the usual assignment rules.  You might need to
involve RMS to make sure it's clear, and there is no particular guarantee
that he will respond entirely consistently with his past decisions.

Frankly, I think any new code from the same projects (e.g. BIND) and the
same copyright holders with similarly permissive license terms is fine for
us to take without new legal consulation.


Thanks,
Roland