It's been revealed that Castle's USB and Iyonix ethernet drivers include portions of code originally from NetBSD, FreeBSD and Intel. Specifically, the Castle USB stack contains copyrighted material from the NetBSD project, the USB mass storage driver includes copyrighted material from FreeBSD and the EtherK driver is derived from copyrighted code from Intel. All the aforementioned code is licensed under the classic BSD licence, which requires redistributions to include appropriate copyright attributions among other things. Unlike the GPL, you don't have to make source code available under the BSD licence.
Today, Castle issued to Iyonix users a documentation pack which included the necessary copyright attributions and other text for the above drivers, as directed by the conditions of the BSD licence. So unlike their previous tussle with open source software, Castle are seemingly playing this one by the book. A note in the documentation release reads, "This update groups all the related documentation, disclaimers and licence conditions in a consistent location for ease of reference. We have re-supplied the relevant documentation in updated form to reflect the current state of play."
"The licence style of BSD derivatives permits their use," Castle's John Ballance commented this morning when we asked Castle if they see the BSDs as providing a route for improving RISC OS. He added, "Indeed, for a long time the [RISC OS] network stack has been based on (and attributed to) NetBSD."
On Friday, Iyonix users were issued beta release USB drivers, which (for the first time) sported an accompanying copyright attribution to NetBSD. A keen reader also spotted similarities between the EtherK module and Intel's gigabit ethernet driver, so we got in touch with Castle. The next day, the updated documentation was issued, which included copyright attributions for EtherK and the USB modules.
Of course, this isn't the first time RISC OS has used BSD derived code (for example, the network stack), and the liberal nature of the BSD licence permits code to be used in closed source commercial products with little disruption. However as the RISC OS platform continues to increasingly rely on open source software to further itself, it's interesting to see where developments are coming from.
Links
Castle website
Other open source software used by Castle