OSNews > Thread > "RE[2]: re" by antik

OpenBSD bcw: Possible GPL Violation Issues

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:14 UTC, submitted by detonator

"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[2]: re

by antik on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:41 UTC in reply to "RE: re"

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.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 4

RE[3]: re

by dylansmrjones on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:43 in reply to "RE[2]: re"

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.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

RE[4]: re

by renox on Fri 6th Apr 2007 14:54 in reply to "RE[3]: re"

Member since:
2005-07-06

I would agree with you if the LGPL was better, but the 'dynamic linking' stuff of LGPL is just stupid..

And I'm not the only one who think so: there are many variants of the LGPL which rephrase it without the 'dynamic linking' restriction.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

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RE[3]: re

by Gnomonic on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:47 in reply to "RE[2]: re"

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

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

RE[4]: re

by ValiSystem on Fri 6th Apr 2007 23:25 in reply to "RE[3]: re"

Member since:
2006-02-28

You trust the vendors for drivers ? Strange, in a world where some multi thousand dollars devices has bogus drivers that make the whole thing almost unusable.

Specs should be public domain, at least to be able to rewrite a bad driver.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[3]: re

by stestagg on Fri 6th Apr 2007 14:49 in reply to "RE[2]: re"

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.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[4]: re

by binarycrusader on Fri 6th Apr 2007 17:41 in reply to "RE[3]: re"

Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

Oh, but it's ok for Stallman to use the GPL to enforce his beliefs about patents on the world with the GPLv3?

It is a two-way "street."

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1