Some bad news

First of all, I want everyone to know that I'm still working on Punix, just at a near-glacial pace.

Secondly, several months ago I decided to clean up the license issue in Punix. The issue is that I'm releasing Punix under the GNU GPLv2—both by my own choice and because I'm using bits of code that are already under the GPLv2 (mostly from PedroM)—but some code is derived from UNIX V6, V7, or 2.11BSD. These latter ancient systems were released a few years ago by Caldera under an 4-clause BSD license. This license has an "advertising clause" which makes it incompatible with the GPL because it adds further restrictions to redistribution that are not allowed under the GPL.

So now I want to remove any "tainted" code. I performed a code audit on each and every function in each source file to determine whether the code was tainted or was ok to leave in Punix. Here are the files that have tainted code in them:

• alloc.c
• bio.c
• fio.c
• inode.c
• namei.c
• pipe.c
• rdwri.c
• tty.c

Unfortunately, this covers a lot of code that implements the buffer system and virtual file system (VFS). On the other hand, it's not very unfortunate because I hadn't fully integrated the VFS code yet anyway. Some of it didn't support modern UNIX standards and conventions either, and I was planning to rewrite it too.

All in all, this is only a minor setback. I have several files of code to re-implement to get a (somewhat) working system. I created a branch named "clean" for working on removing the "dirty" code. It doesn't compile as of r144, but I hope to fix that soon. :)