Like I said, I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect there are a lot of issues
that can arise from not owning the source base. I worked in the medical
device business, and I know the FDA has lots of problem with ownership
issues with regards to liability (can you imagine somebody who
contributed some BSD code without compensation being sued when it is
found out that a bug in his code caused the death of a patient ?). The
“no warranty” argument doesn’t fly, because this is exactly what the FDA
does not like (they don’t like it from commercial vendors whom they most
definitely would go after - regardless of disclaimers - in a serious
case of negligence, let alone from someone who never derived any
compensation for his work). My guess is that the only way that the FDA
would condone “ownerless” code being included in a class 3 medical
device is if the original author took ownership, agreed to be held
liable for negligence in developing his code (negligence could be
defined as not following “industry standard” s/w engineering practices),
and placed some sort of performance bond (since he is not a corporate
entity).
That’s the FDA, I imagine the FAA would be even less impressed with the
idea of “ownerless” code in a flight control system (where several
hundred people can be wiped out with a single software failure).
VxWorks is used in both of these applications. LynxOS (which I
suspect has free BSD code in it) has never been approved for use in
these applications (they brag about the fact they are approved for use
in a “supplemental navigation system” - which is a system that may cause
a temporary disruption of flight deck operations if it fails in a non
self-evident manner - e.g. your GPS moving map display fails in a way
that it appears to be working, and shows you on course but you aren’t -
the pilot will realize fairly quickly that the VOR, or inertial nav, or
compass, or visual cues don’t agree with the information presented by
the supplemental nav system, and turn it off)
QNX, being modular, can have all of the “ownerless” stuff stripped out,
in order to qualify as a COTS vendor for these applications. I bet that
with VxWorks architecture, that once they start tying the Posix stuff
into it, it will be nearly inseparable from the rest of the code, and
hence they don’t have the luxury that QNX has of using cheap “ownerless”
code for vanilla commercial applications, and removing it for safety
critical applications; hence, my suspicion that they bought BSDi for
ownership issues.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Mantler [mailto:tony@astra.mb.ca]
Posted At: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 8:11 AM
Posted To: advocacy
Conversation: WindRiver buys BSD - new competition for QNX?
Subject: Re: WindRiver buys BSD - new competition for QNX?
Previously, Rennie Allen wrote in qdn.public.qnxrtp.advocacy:
[…]
Both FreeBSD and NetBSD are distributed under the (aptly named) BSD
liscence,
which lets you do pretty much anything you want with the code, from
modifying
and resdistributing it openly, to a wholesale appropriation into a
closed
commercial product.
Yes, but they wouldn’t own the code base, as they do with BSDi, and
as
QSSL does with QNX.
I fail to see what difference it would make. There are plenty of
BSD-derived
UNIXes out there, all wholly owned by their respective companies who
charge
fees, set liscencing schemes, etc to their own schedules.
Do a ‘find /usr/include -type f | xargs grep -i bsd’ on your favorite
commercial
unix flavour if you don’t belive me. 
Remember, this isn’t GPL-land where everyone has to share and share
alike.
Cheers - Tony ‘Nicoya’ Mantler
–
Tony Mantler | Proud ---- Days since the last
QNX Consulting | of our | 27 |
tony@astra.mb.ca | Record ---- “Gerbil Incident”
