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IP Theft in the Linux Kernel
"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."
ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.
You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.
Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.
Microsoft has incorporated BSD code into Windows various times, each time giving proper credit and keeping copyright notices intact.
Don't try to reflect this onto Microsoft. Clearly the Linux developers fucked up here.
Here is the location at RedHat where you can get the code and patch. Link found on The Linux IDE Project Site
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Okay, so Søren reverse engineers the proprietary data structures developed at great cost by corporations, and then bitches when his work is ripped off by one of his fellow Open Source travelers. Give me a break!
First, what Soren did was not plagiarism (claiming another's work as his own) nor theft (stealing another's property). He just made a part that works as a replacement for a factory part, much like the thriving parts industry in the auto world.
What Red Hat's developers did wasn't "theft", since they were not required to have permission to use or modify and re-release the code. It was plagiarism -- essentially they took some of Soren's parts (which were free for the taking), filed off the serial numbers, then stamped their own on.
It's not illegal to sell someone else's parts if you acquired them legally, but it is illegal to claim them as your own make without permission, regardless of how they were acquired.
The only place Soren might have problems is if the driver algorithms were patented, and even there drivers exist in a world of murky law apart from applications. I seem to remember some abortive efforts by sound and video card manufacturers to squash third-party open-source drivers that got such negative press reaction that they were abandoned.
-- Old Man Kensey
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0012.3/0 538.html
> I've read everything that I can find regarding support of the Highpoint
> controllers RAID functionality under Linux, and I understand what the issues
> have been. The one promising bit of information that I dug up in this process is
> that the 'pseudo' RAID functionality of the Highpoint and Promise IDE RAID
> controllers is now supported in FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE and 5.0-CURRENT). My
> question is, can the new BSD code be leveraged to add support for these
> controllers to the Linux kernel, and could we reasonably expect to see such
> support in the near future?
>
> (I think that most all of the relevant/important bits are in ata-raid.c and/or
> ata-raid.h. In
> any event, the IDE/ATA guy over on the FreeBSD side is Soren Schmidt
> (sos@freebsd.org), and he
> wrote all of the stuff for this.