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I'm with Theo on this one. The best way to get licence compliance is to talk to someone privately first. Telling the world is the last step.

But I don't agree that "IP theft" happened. What was involved was copyright. Talking about copyright by using a blanket term is just adding confusion, and using a senseless blanket term such as "IP" is just being silly. The OpenBSD guy did not "thieve" any geographic designations, or plant varieties, or design schematics - which are all encompased by "IP" - he "thieved" copyright. Good article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

But I wouldn't use the word "theft" either. If I steel your lunch, then you will be hungry in the afternoon and I could understand you being unhappy. If I copied your lunch while your back was turned, you would be none the wiser or thinner.

"Theft" and violation of copyright are two very different things. Each can be wrong in various circumstances, but the two should not be confused.

In all fairness, as I read the thread, it was Theo who started to state, that Micheal Buesch et al make the implication :

GPL license violation == thief

Examples for this behavior:

which I quoted from this post [1], other examples of Theo accusing everybody else from implicitly equating license violation with theft are for example [2]


which is from [2]. I'm pretty sure you can find other instances too.

I try to do not take sides in this issue, as I think,
that the license violation should be out of discussion (the GPL kicks in at distribution, whether the code works, is functional or not, period) and both sides have not acted very luckily.

But I can't help to think, that while I would have prefered too to be addressed in private first, the fact that the code was already out in the wild under a incompatible and more permissive license
without the attribution of the rightful copyright holders makes it understandable, that they tried to inform all involved parties (note the explanation/motivation for the CC list here [3]), so yeah, going public is a valid option.

Furthermore, note that if they "really" wanted to go full public, they could have sent out a statement to the tech press instead or blogged about it (or even submitted it to /. ). THAT would have been clearly over the top.

The step to take the matters in a first step to mailing list instead of starting with a private notification may also have something to do with previous bad blood between the wireless teams at the OpenBSD and Linux camps, but that is just my interpretation. (see the sub-thread in reply to [4])

[1]http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/1588/m...
[2]http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/1600/m...
[3]http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.bcm54xx.devel/4002/mat...
[4]http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/1615/m...

I'm with Theo on this one. The best way to get licence compliance is to talk to someone privately first. Telling the world is the last step.

While I do agree that this could have (should have) been handled much more maturely, it did need to be publicized that the re-licensed code was taken from a GPL'd project and re-licensed illegally. People freely "borrow" BSD-licensed code whenever they see it; the Linux bcm authors didn't want that happening to their code, since that's not the license they chose to use. It would have been nice if they had given the BSD contributor a chance to correct and publicize his own action though...

I'm with Theo on this one. The best way to get licence compliance is to talk to someone privately first. Telling the world is the last step.

Why? The bcw code was public, so it was the bcm43xx code. The violation was therefore already public -they just noticed the community of that. People must be aware of public consequences of public actions.

I often admire Theo de Raadt, but this time he acted as a completely hysterical 14-y.o. teen. I read the whole thread. On the latest half of it, Theo just ravages about "he did a mistake and you imply he was doing that on purpose" -How can you copy code by "mistake"? Marcus even admitted that he did it on purpose! He was surely in good faith, but it was not a "mistake". He was fully aware of copyright issues. He just thought that fixing these later was OK.

If I was Marcus, 1)I'd have answered as in his first mail, 2)I'd have *temporarily* deleted the code from the CVS tree 3)I'd have talked with bcm43xx people about relicensing etc.

The fact he just bitterly dropped the ball after a perfectly reasonable first mail in which he apologized etc. makes me think there's the shadow of Theo behind.

But I wouldn't use the word "theft" either.

This I fully agree. Using the word "theft" is always wrong when talking about "IP", and in this case is plain ridicolous.

>However, the linux-driver-devs could have handled it less mean, but Theo de Raadt is just as mean.

Theo isn't equal to Marcus, they have no dictatorship in OpenBSD. If you're thinking of that, you have to handle Linus the same, he too has *leadership* in the kernel development, but it isn' dictatorship! And Linus too uses some harsh words (look at Gnome e.g. or FreeBSD, interface-nazis and idiots) ....

I haven't written anything about the way the projects are being lead. This is not about the "leadership" (if any) but about the behaviour of individuals. ***** the collective.

And yes, Linus can be mean too

I love it when you are talking about IP theft. You are among the same people who will say Microsoft should not charge licensing fee to open their protocols which is their IP.

You will be the same person who will be against patents:)

It is funny to see double standards all around in GPL world.

BSD world is where i live and it is heaven there...

So you think it's okay to violate copyright when the GPL is involved?

Never mind that you're completely changing the subject (and going into ad hominem attacks) by bringing patents and Microsoft in.

I, for one, respect *all* copyrights, whether they are closed-source, GPL or BSDL.