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[3]: re
by Gnomonic on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:47 UTC 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

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

RE[4]: re
by ValiSystem on Fri 6th Apr 2007 23:25 in reply to "RE[3]: re"
ValiSystem 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