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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