# List of steps to rebrand FreeBSD?



## sgeos (Mar 10, 2015)

Is there a definitive list of steps to rebrand FreeBSD?  brand.4th(8) and getting uname(1) to reflect the brand immediately come to mind. Specifically, this is an embedded client project.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Mar 11, 2015)

sgeos said:


> Is there a definitive list of steps to rebrand FreeBSD?  brand.4th(8) and getting uname(1) to reflect the brand immediately come to mind. Specifically, this is an embedded client project.


/usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh is where the info in uname(1) gets set. Note that there are many other places where the name FreeBSD appears. For starters, do `# strings /boot/kernel/kernel | grep FreeBSD`

You might want to think about what you actually want to accomplish with this - TCP fingerprinting will probably still identify the system as FreeBSD, or at least as "*BSD family". A number of sysctls such as kern.osreldate need to be unchanged for various things to work properly, and will reveal the OS info.

Many of the embedded systems I've seen run Linux and every one of them displays a Linux identification when it boots. Of course, that might be somewhere the "average user" doesn't see it, such as on the console port of a router, which is not normally connected to anything. If the primary / sole user interface your device provides is a web server (for example), you can call your device whatever you like there.

That's the technical side of things. You should also consider licensing issues. The FreeBSD license says (among other things):

_"Copyright 1992-2015 The FreeBSD Project. All rights reserved.

[...]

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."_


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