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GPL Code Found In OpenBSD Wireless Driver
NormalVisual writes "The mailing lists were buzzing recently when Michael Buesch, one of the maintainers for the GPL'd bc43xx Broadcom wireless chip driver project, called the OpenBSD folks to task for apparently including code without permission from his project in the OpenBSD bcw project, which aims to provide functionality with Broadcom wireless chips under that OS. It seems that the problem has been resolved for now with the BSD driver author totally giving up on the project and Theo De Raadt taking the position that Buesch's posts on the subject were 'inhuman.'" More commentary from the BSD community is over at undeadly.org.
The whole thing lasted two days, much less than the blog and news coverage. Someone will come along and write this driver for BSD, and the BSD developer will have some well-deserved cooling-off time.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
One should never expect him to see the other side of an issue.
His team were caught red-handed, and had the gall to blame the people who got ripped. He doesn't even seem to get copyright, saying there was no infringement because the driver wasn't yet ready for general use is beyond moronic.
Fast on the heels of Ballmer's tantrums and chair throwing, the BSD community was today wracked again by the borderline personality disorders and rageaholics that permeate the open source movement. Theo De Raadt, founder of the Open BSD Brigade, in an apparent fit of anger, threw his fist through a wall as he was cussing out an acolyte of Chairman Richard Stallman, leader of the competing marxist organization, the Free Stalin Foundation.
Hans Reiser, an open source maven who murdered his wife in cold blood, commented from prison that open source programmers had no abnormal personality problems, and were all "very smart people, very intelligent." Eric Raymon, fresh from a trip to the Paul Revere Institute Convention and Bondage Festival in Las Vegas, echoed these comments: "What the world doesn't understand, is that we are geniuses. There is nothing wrong with using strong language to intimidate idiotarians and freedom hating anti-gun liberazis".
Steve Jobs, emerging from a meditation chamber in his northern california home, opined that "he would fire half his open source staff" that night, as they had failed to properly implement a bitwise portrait of the mona lisa on the back of the motherboard for the new Apple Yojimbo motherboard family, slated to debut this fall.
The BeOS developers, currently washing dishes at a Sacramento Olive Garden, had the following comments: "Yeah, we are kinda bummed that we lost all that money. But frankly, I'm kind of glad to be done with those freaks. Apple, Microsoft, Lunix, what a bunch of creeps and sociopaths."
Echoed his boss "Johnny called in sick so I need you to work late tonight, is that OK?"
--
(parts of this story were contributed by James Gandalfini)
Yes, but according to the licenses involved (in this case the GPL).
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
It is. This leaves the question of whether you are OK with some people who refuse to share. If the answer is no, use GPL. If yes, use BSD. You also have the option of using GPL, and asking for money from those who prefer exchanging money over sharing code, as MySQL does with its dual-licensing.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
...is how you can scroll down past the cascade of de Raadt nonsense and find an actual reasonable response from the bcw maintainer himself!
Unfortunately, with so much noise coming from de Raadt, the only thing most people are going to see are his ridiculous responses.
I'm sure someone else has drawn this line before, but he reminds me of the OpenBSD mascot. Like a blowfish, he fills up with (hot) air when threatened and is very defensive.
If you read through the email conversation, you'll see a VERY diplomatic initial message from Michael, a straw-man attack from Theo ("Do you feel that Marcus should give up his efforts?"), a VERY reasonable response ("No, he should _not_ give up. The opposite is true. He should start to contact us to get relicensing permission from us to speed up bcw development and stay legal") and then profanity and rage from Theo.
The slashdot post, the weblog entry, and Theo's comments are all ad hominem, and baseless ad hominem at that- the core issue here is that GPL code was taken in violation of its license. The owner of the code contacted and admittedly large number of people, publicly, about it. It is hardly out of line given Theo's well-known grandstanding full of rhetoric (hardware drivers for OpenBSD come to mind.)
Michael pointed out the violation and asked the developer/OpenBSD people to contact him to work out relicensing the code. Instead, Theo attacked him relentlessly and repeatedly. After the first 6 posts between Theo and Michael, I felt sick and stopped reading.
Please help metamoderate.
I have read all the threads on the OBSD lists.
Without question, the Linux developer did not need to cc the whole word when first making his inquiry -- he should have contacted them in private. I would also suspect that the BSD developer was just using the Linux code as a drop-in replacement for the time being until he rewrote it with a BSD license. I do not believe the BSD developer was trying to steal anything or take credit for something he did not develop. He made a mistake, for sure, but I do not believe there was any ill will on his part.
However, the biggest story in all of this is just how freaking childish Theo is. I cannot for the life of me figure this guy out. He kills his own cause and make OBSD look like a playground for schoolyard bullies. Imagine how much better he and OBSD would have looked if they had responded to the initial mailing list post with something like: "Hey, we would have appreciated it if you had contacted us privately. In any event, we are quite confident there was no intent to take GPL code in violation of the license. However, we will discuss this, decide the appropriate remedy, and respond to you privately. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."
Matter solved, no drama. But Theo has to open his big fat mouth. Theo: it's called taking the high road, even if you didn't start it. Try it sometime.
Besides, Theo himself cross-posts to other lists all the time to incite flame wars. Just look at last month's FreeBSD-advocacy list -- he cross posted during a thread about the use of his dear Puffy on an anti-blob poster. Pot, meet kettle.
The crux of Theo's complaint seems to be that they "went public" by emailing too many people. When some of the people in on the email pointed out that they were the ones that actually did the hard work of reverse-engineering, Theo said:
Wow. Just, wow. I often agree with Theo even when he's being a knob because he's usually got a point. But in this case, he's been embarrassed, and he is using whatever he can think of as an incredibly flimsy excuse to attack the people whom the OpenBSD developer plagiarised. What a childish, unproductive attitude. Pulling the code and giving up on the driver instead of taking them up on their offer to relicense the code is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and worse for your users. Just take your ball and go home, Theo.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Copying code without permission is the worst possible offense in open source land. His righteous indignation is absolutely justified. The appropriate response is "Our deepest and most sincere apologies. The code has been removed. Thank you for deciding not to seek any further retribution."
Arguing over not being nice about calling out this offense is cowardly and sociopathic. e.g. playing politics.
eh, a lot of whining on both sides occurred - the whole thing could definitely have been handled much more professionally and politely by both sides. Buesch could've contacted Glocker privately via email and asked him to remove the copyrighted material from CVS, and encouraged him to contact the copyright holders-in-question if he were interested in obtaining assistance in getting his bcw driver to work. It's called giving him "the benefit of the doubt."
The interests of expediency (notifying Glocker and the other copyright holders, as well as people who did the reverse-engineering (wtf? why? I still can't figure that one out)) didn't serve either group's PR interests. Now people are lining up on the tired BSD/ISC vs. GPL battlefront again, fighting over something that only involves a few developers. I don't think Glocker should've committed that GPL nonsense into CVS, but I do think he should've been given a chance privately to correct his mistake. All this hassle and stupid flamewar because simple politeness was dispensed with. Gad, I'm glad I don't work on anything involving these groups.
When you share, and the other party does not, that is not sharing any longer. That is a gift. It always entertains me that the people who protest that they are most deserving of gifts of source code from the community are those who refuse to share theirs.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Wah... What the hell? The author of some code contacts the OpenBSD to communicate that copyright was infringed upon. The OpenBSD guys explode in a series of "zealot" name calling. I guess I can see some sense in privately contacting the OpenBSD dev. But on the other hand, it's in the OpenBSD development tree. Probably it's a good idea to tell people that it shouldn't be there.
Reading the initial email, I can't find any hint of malice. Just expressing the facts and offering to provide a license for the code. If this mailing list blows up because of something so unbelievably trivial, it doesn't seem like a fun place to hang out in. It's just weird.
But something else bothers me about the response too. It seems like the people there are *upset* that the original person informed them of the copyright infringement. I mean, nobody denied it. Everyone seems to agree there was an infringement. It just seems that some of the OpenBSD people think that the Linux people are assholes for choosing to license their code under the GPL... And apparently it's even worse to ask people not to infringe on that license.
That's just bizarre... It kind of makes you wonder who the zealots are... Personally, I'm kind of neutral on the subject. I like the GPL in some instances, I like other licenses in other instances. But, I just can't quite wrap my head around BSD guys (of all people) taking such a strange stance...
Except if this was done in private no one who pulled the tainted code from the public CVS would know. There would be copies of the code floating around in public that were in violation of the GPL. It had to be public to guarantee everyone knows (Especially Broadcom) that the BSD code in the public tree is actually GPL code.
I managed to catch front-row seats to the whole battle myself. Buesch (the Linux bcm43xx developer) posted a formal but not in any way harsh question to the BSD developer on the public bcm43xx list and to the BSD list. In any language, when communicating in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people, using more formal dialects is almost always the rule. Some people find the higher dialects offensive, but almost everyone appreciates the attempts to not sound like one of the local street punks hanging out around the corner at the strip mall trolling for some action.
Apparently the OpenBSD people were put off by this, which is unfortunate. And apparently they were so focused on making it yet another OpenBSD vs The World incident that they completely lost sight of the goal of both projects, which is to create Free and Open drivers for other people to use, despite the hardware specifications not being available. It's an unfortunate situation, of course.
Hopefully after everyone has a chance to reflect on the situation, the OpenBSD developers will realize that even though many other situations are actually OpenBSD vs The World, this is not one of them, and the Linux bcm-43xx team was not only willing to work with them on relicensing code, they also published the results of an incredible reverse engineering effort for anyone, including the OpenBSD team, to use in order to achieve this goal.
I seriously cannot believe this. Why should the discussion focus on shooting the messenger? A developer was caught infringing on copyrights pants down. The infringement is hard to do without intent. Would you deal with such a "rogue" developer privately, or send a mail to project mailinglists (perhaps a core or dev list) which likely would be public anyway? Maybe OpenBSD would mail people privately, but can you not understand that others decide otherwise? If your developer makes these kinds of mistakes, the issue WILL be public and you WILL have to make a statement sooner or later.
:)
Transparency on copyright issues is just as important as transparency on security. It serves as an example to all open source projects to be watchful about these issues. This is not only about OpenBSD. OpenBSD is a mature open source project and they have nothing to be insecure (huhuh) about. Sometimes OpenBSD may have exploits, sometimes it may have copyright issues. We live, we learn. Code-wise this is a small issue and it's a fixable issue, as the bc43xx developers said in their statement.
I find the approach of the bc43xx developers perfectly defendable. The first mail was clear, diplomatic, complete, and explicitly offers to work out a deal. That's more than you usually get when you infringe on someone's rights! Unfortunately, the only result of it was another episode of "the Theo Show". Even though the issue was broadcasted, the OpenBSD project still had a great immediate opportunity to contain the issue. Instead, the bc43xx developers doesn't receive much but irrational unconstructive replies, intentional misinterpretation, blaming people for OpenBSD's own developer's decisions, etcetera.
If going public with an issue is inhuman, how is turning the debate into a flamefest human? It was shameful to read. The Theo Show IS the public spectacle. Perhaps it is part of how he defines his personality. In fact, this rogue attitude seems to work for OpenBSD - OpenBSD regularly gets a lot of mainstream exposure from these kind of fights. Maybe it's what saving OpenBSD from becoming irrelevant. Well, good for them. They probably make a great OS (I use FreeBSD exclusively). It's just too bad that they haven't got a Broadcom driver.
( ^_^)/
'Inhuman' hardly describes being open about copyright violation. Michael was polite in his initial message; the immediate responses were to flame him. It's hard to accidentally include someone else's driver code in yours; Theo still kept saying that it was clearly an accident.
As for leaving GPL stub code...it would have been difficult to fully audit the driver code to see how much needed to be rewritten. Probably some GPL code would have stayed in the driver through release.
But since Michael was able to discover his code in the bcw driver, it was being distributed. *That's* clearly illegal. If only a few people had CVS access and nobody was actively distributing the bcw driver, then Michael wouldn't have had a case, or even known about it. They didn't even take that step with a non-working driver. I have no sympathy for the bcw maintainers.
Not only in this, but in thread in general Michael Buesch shows remarkable restraint. He is the one with a legitimate grievance and he is being insulted ad infinitum.
This is not a matter of GPL vs. BSD. It is a simple matter of breach of copyright. Everything else is bullshit.
Of course it is. Of course, most people don't realise this, because the evil, inhuman Michael Busch used his time machine to travel back to 2005 and plant fake mailing list archives saying that the reason they chose the GPL over the BSD license was because they didn't want it taken proprietary especially by Broadcom, because of particular features of the open driver, when we all know it's just an evil, inhuman plot against Theo and OpenBSD. Thanks for alerting us to this deviousness, AC!
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
How any code from a reverse engineered spec that blatantly just guesses at a lot of things is better than something written with the docs is far beyond me.
I'm going to venture a guess that you're either not a professional software engineer, or still fresh out of college and very low on real world experience, then. At the very least, you've seen the codebases at very few companies, or you've just been very, very lucky.
I've had to throw out code and start fresh because the original code I was given was code that had been written originally years ago by an outside contractor brought in to do it, then maintained for the next two years by the hardware engineers themselves, under the premise that they're engineers, they've got a C compiler and a SAMS book, what more qualifications did they need? I was brought in because they couldn't figure out how to add some new features they wanted. The reason wasn't because the new features were tricky, the reason was the code was so hacked up it was impossible to change anything without breaking everything else. Alas, this level of code is all too common at companies that see their primary product as hardware rather than software.
I've also seen horribly base code that needed to be replaced at companies that had paid software engineers maintaining it the whole time. Why do you think the fact that they were paid software engineers somehow magically makes their code any better? It was crap, and the only reason they were able to get away with it was because no one outside their department ever saw it. There's no easier way to hide bad coding than to work inside a corporation on proprietary software. It's the easiest place in the world for it to occur, and often the hardest place in the world to get incompetent engineers off a project.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Sorry, but when someone's called on you to explain seemingly-illegally-copied code, telling them to "go fuck themselves" is not a bloody option. Try that in the real world sometime, and see how fast an indictment for copyright infringement and the corresponding civil suit comes flying in.
Also, you say he "kill[ed] a truly free implementation of the driver in question," you are totally missing the issue. The entire point of this debate is that the bloody driver wasn't free at all! It was GPL'd code, which gives you the rights to use it within the terms of the GPL. Stripping the legitimate author(s) name(s) from the code and relicensing it under a looser (or, in the case of the GPL, tighter) license is one of the main things the GPL and other licenses are designed to prevent.
I find it regrettable that Michael decided to go so public with this (indeed, as others pointed out, it could probably have been solved privately) but it is absolutely his right, as the "sorry little fuck" who owns the copyright on the code, to protect it as he sees fit. I think the OpenBSD team should be remarkably relieved that Michael diplomatically approached the issue and offered to assist in relicensing the code instead of simply suing Marcus and the other perpetrators of this infringement.
So stop heaping abuse on the guy simply because he chose to protect his legal right to have his original product (the code) used only under the license he selected for it and to not have it used outside those boundaries by anyone else, whether by accident or design. Instead, give him credit for offering to assist in reaching a constructive solution to the issue.
-- Andrew Morritt
Below are two edits to the piece here.
The first. Let's pretend this was GPL code taken by Microsoft, not OpenBSD, for inclusion in Windows. To me, that looks like Mr Buesch is being decent.
Now let's switch to the opposite - Mr Buesch as a Windows developer, finding Microsoft code in OpenBSD Again, a response like that if it were from Microsoft to the OpenBSD team would be considered highly decent.
I think Michael Buesch did well