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.
E-mail Print r 0   183 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/dm4
Thread beginning with comment 228478
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[15]: re
by Adam S on Sat 7th Apr 2007 15:34 UTC in reply to "RE[14]: re"
Adam S
Member since:
2005-04-01

the way which the issue was raised was entirely inappropriate. This was an incomplete driver. It has not shipped with any oBSD releases. It was well known that the developers were going to use the linux driver as a reference


I'm sure that's true. But it was published on a public CVS. And just because it was incomplete doesn't mean it was OK to publish it.

A simple email directed to the developer and Theo would have fixed the issue rather quickly. Michael Buesch *KNEW* that cross posting that email would cause a fire storm. He is an absolute idiot if he thought otherwise.


Maybe. A simple email certainly would have sufficed, but he chose another way. That might make him a dick, but it doesn't make him wrong.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1