On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Brett Glass wrote:

> It shouldn't be hard to do. Will anyone volunteer to be the other half
> of the clean room reverse engineering team so that we can avoid copyright
> problems and whip this out as soon as possible?

if the code is fresh, and written from scratch, there will be no copyright
problems.

it just has to be able to decypher the tarball, after all. since tar's
command line structure and switches predate GNU-tar, i don't think that
will be an issue. i don't know many people who use the GNU style long
switch convention when doing a fast tar script.

in looking at /usr/src/bin/pax/tar.[c,h], i don't see any evidence of the
GPL in there. as far as i know, you have to choose to install GNU-tar, as
a separate program; something which i do, to ensure compatability accross
all my machines and platforms.

if i'm wrong in this understanding, please correct me, and point me to the
evidence that says otherwise.

> >should i expect this before or after the BSD licensed
> >C compiler?
>
> Actually, there already ARE BSD-licensed C compilers, including TenDRA.
> The BSDs should use one of them.

yes, but can any of those compile the OS as it's already written?

i wouldn't want to be the poor victim assigned to rewrite all the lines of
code.

counting comments, and i assume, whitespace (meaning it's not 100%
accurate):
   [janhi src] {73}$ find /usr/src -name "*.[h,c]" -print | xargs wc -l \
   | grep -v total | awk ' { s = s + $1 } { print s } ' | tail -1
   6217166

that's at least 5 million lines of code.

as several have said before me: if it's not broken, don't fix it.

-------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+
  http://caustic.org/~jan jancaustic.org
    "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse
         of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche

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