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...why should one do so when the act itself (the hijacking of the rights to the code in question) never should have happened and since the news value of this is legitimate enough for them to discuss openly in a forum?

Never attribute to malice that which is readily explained by stupidity. In this particular case, the driver had BSD bits and GPL bits in the source and someone removed one of the notices by accident (presumably not realizing where the BSD-only chuck started and ended).

Seeing as how the issue was fixed within a few minutes of it being pointed out, I don't think it's a big deal.

There doesn't seem to be any stealling going on at all.

It seems that is was originally licenced under the GPLv2 (and also under the BSD) and it's been included in the -mm kernel under the GPLv2.

I don't see what the problem is.

Yes, the patch as emailed would be a violation of the BSD license. However, the patch has not been accepted into the Linux kernel, and as we can see from the ensuing LKML thread, the licensing details will be ironed out before anyone even thinks about merging it.

LKML is a public mailing list. Anyone can submit patches, and the only thing the kernel community can do about bad patches, including those with licensing issues, is to reject them with or without comments. The kernel community has already concluded that this patch cannot be accepted as written.

The difference between this situation and the BCM thing is that BCM was committed to OpenBSD's official CVS repositories. Furthermore, the OpenBSD project had no legitimate use for that code, whereas the Linux community can use ath5k under an appropriately derived license.

The Linux project is permitted under the BSD to add the GPL to this code. Depending on how it is added, the resulting code could be dual-licensed or GPL only. When used under the GPL (in either case), the clauses retained from the BSD are redundant. That doesn't mean they can be removed, however.

So, functionally, the Linux developers are correct. They can redistribute ath5k under the GPL or under a BSD/GPL dual-license. But the patch as emailed is not the correct way to do this. The clauses from the BSD must be retained in order to satisfy the redistribution requirements.

It's likely that the act of emailing improperly licensed code to a public mailing list constitutes copyright infringement on the part of the sender. However, is the project or its various hosting and mirroring services liable for code appearing on the mailing list? Can't they simply disclaim responsibility like OSNews does for comments?

BTW, the BSD community has repeated held that BSD code can be relicensed by adding restrictions (GPL, proprietary, etc). Theo is dead wrong when he says "none else can add a GPL to it." Proprietary vendors do this with BSD code all the time.

Edited 2007-08-29 15:30

Funny, if Microsoft were the guilty party, no one would of even mentioned that they should have been 'given time' to sort thing out.

can't we give the parties involved some minimal amount of time to sort this out *before* posting this flamebait?

why? when this sort of thing happen in April of this year between Michael Buesch and OpenBSD. Michael Buesch posted all over the mailing lists when he was accusing Openbsd of GPL license and
Copyright violations of the bcw driver. he did not give time to work things out.

It would also be nice if you didn't make it sound like your title, 'Linux Developers Steal OpenBSD Code for Wireless Driver', is a quote from the original when it isn't. The original headline is simply 'Linux Driver Copyright Violation', nothing about stealing.

again back in april,Buesch made sound like openbsd was stealing. when it turned out to be only an honest mistake on the dev part

Edited 2007-08-29 16:56

I seem to remember there were 60 something commits to that developers tree in violation of the license. Maybe 5-10 would be accidental, but 60+ *different* commits?

No, that was intentional on the BSD developer's part. The only sad part is that he quit working on it when the linux bcm43xx developer offered to dual license the code.