[Info-vax] GNV

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-09-11 17:51:32 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> On 9/11/16 9:57 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2016-09-11 14:48:13 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:
>> 
>>> On 9/11/16 8:31 AM, IanD wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Is gnu released as part of OpenVMS now? Isn't it a separate download?  
>>>> Why? Why isn't it part of the standard OpenVMS distribution and install?
>>> 
>>> I assume you mean GNV, not gnu? Some of it is probably covered by GPLv3 
>>> now and might pose problems for inclusion with the base OS. But, 
>>> generally speaking, yes, why not? Apple has something like 200 open 
>>> source packages distributed with macOS, which is close to two orders of 
>>> magnitude more than VMS has without extra installations.
>> 
>> I've not encountered any GPL3 source code in OS X / macOS.
> 
> Right. Apple has steadily eliminated GPL-based packages and stayed with 
> down-revision versions of some packages in order to remain under GPLv2 
> rather than GPLv3. bash, for example is at 3.2 on macOS whereas the 
> current upstream version is 4.3.
> 
> GNV, on the other hand, has embraced the latest versions of GNU 
> software and is now at or pretty close to current for several key 
> packages. But that means they are GPLv3, and, while IANAL, I think that 
> means they could not be included as part of the base install of a 
> proprietary OS.

Ayup.   And Apple publishes OS source code, which VSI and HPE don't.   
I'd not expect to see GNV nor other GPL3 code to appear in the base 
OpenVMS distro, and I'm not particularly fond of assembling an 
operating system from kits — though OpenVMS already supports and 
increasingly requires that assembly — as it just adds complexity and 
testing and grief and glue code.  Incorporating any third-party code 
into the base OpenVMS distro likely requires legal review, too.

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