Star OpenBSD bcw: Possible GPL Violation Issues
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:14 UTC, submitted by detonator
OpenBSD "I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible GPL license and therefore copyright violations in your bcw driver. We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license)." The entire thread can be found here.
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RE: re
by Gnomonic on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:33 UTC in reply to "re"
Gnomonic
Member since:
2005-08-17

Maybe it is sort of over reacting, but if the developers accept their (GPL'ed) code to be taken and relicensed as BSD, the next step is the code to be taken and possibly be used in proprietary projects.

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RE[2]: re
by antik on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:41 in reply to "RE: re"
antik Member since:
2006-05-19

Maybe it is sort of over reacting, but if the developers accept their (GPL'ed) code to be taken and relicensed as BSD, the next step is the code to be taken and possibly be used in proprietary projects.

Drivers should be public domain ONLY.

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RE[3]: re
by dylansmrjones on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:43 in reply to "RE[2]: re"
dylansmrjones Member since:
2005-10-02

Naaaaaaah... no reason for that. LGPL would be better. Can be blended with proprietary licenses but still protects the original project.

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RE[3]: re
by Gnomonic on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:47 in reply to "RE[2]: re"
Gnomonic Member since:
2005-08-17


Drivers should be public domain ONLY.


I totally agree with you. But then again, all vendors should be the ones releasing the drivers, or at least the specs.

When one side plays dirty, the developers should take measures. the bcm43xx developers have chosen the GPL and other developers should respect this.

Edited 2007-04-06 13:49

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RE[3]: re
by stestagg on Fri 6th Apr 2007 14:49 in reply to "RE[2]: re"
stestagg Member since:
2006-06-03

It is not your place to enforce your beliefs on the whole world. Whether the GPL is morally applicable to drivers is not the issue here.

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RE[2]: re
by Oliver on Fri 6th Apr 2007 17:05 in reply to "RE: re"
Oliver Member since:
2006-07-15

And *then* exactly then, you can bash him to death. But before that you can talk and like you see,they have deleted it at once.

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