Slashdot Mirror
Sigma Designs/XVid Update
Reagen Ward and many other people have written in with updates to the Sigma Designs/XVid situation, reported a few days ago. Sigma has replied in email and a press release that they intend to make the source code available, however, they seem to be paying lip service at best to the terms of the GNU Public License. Grant Gross from Newsforge has been pursuing the story and in a story yesterday and another today lays out the current situation.
The kernel drivers appear to be little more than marshelling/unmarshelling stubs to let the user space library communicate with the card. While register-level documentation is available, it isn't developer friendly, as there is no designers' guide that would help a non-hard-core video hardware embedded developer to write their own code: maybe it's just me, but I find the lack of context establishment in the register-only documentation limiting.
People have found Sigma's proprieteray user-space code somewhat buggy, and the present situation makes it difficult for the community to write its own. While I can sympathize with Sigma Designs' predicament following the apparent mistake of a rogue programmer, one way they can "make it up" to the community would be to go beyond the minimal legal GPL requirements and release more source and documentation for their other fine products.
You could've hired me.
I'm so tired of hearing the 'evil loner' excuse from companies. Make someone responsible. Fire their asses or have someone resign. Show the world this crap won't be tolerated. Instead what we get is this lame excuse that we're not to blame because of some rogue employee. When employees fail, it's management's responsibility.
Yes, they have made the source code available. However, they nowhere state that it is a derivative work of XviD (although they state that it was 'inspired' by XviD) - they are claiming complete copyright over it.
Why should you care?
It's not a licencing issue - it's a copyright issue. If a have some GPL code, and I own the copyright, then I have the right to relicence the code any way I wish (including giving a company the right to use it in a closed source application - probably for a fee). If I have GPL code which I do *not* own the copyright for, then I have *no* rights to relicence.
This is a similar situation to that facing Mozilla a few months ago - they wanted to relicence the code, but couldn't unless they could contact *every single copyright owner* to get consent (and in Mozilla's case this meant every contributor of a significant patch).
Sigma Designs have taken someone elses code, and claimed copyright over it. This copyright claim (if it were correct) gives them the right to use the stolen code in closed source applications -- and it *is* being used in closed source and hardware applications.
So it doesn't matter that Sigma have opened the source to the stolen code. That's the smaller evil.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I'm more inclined to think that they're doing this because of the huge backlash they got. This story got published all over the place, both before and after Slashdot. They knew they screwed up, and probably they knew that they were in legally questionable waters. In any case, they saw a bunch of people saying, "I'll stop buying from Sigma," and all this combined probably contributed to their current course of action.