Linux Wireless Driver Violates BSD License?

bsdphx writes "After years of encouragement from the OpenBSD community for others to use Reyk Floeter's free Atheros wireless driver, it seems that the Linux world is finally listening. Unfortunately, they seem to think that they can strip the BSD license right out of it."

Comments

Re:No, it doesn't.

[MMC Monster]

Not just that, but it appears that the original file was dual licensed to BSD and GPLv2.

What exactly is this article about?

Re:Hmmmm

[squiggleslash]

Absolutely. This situation is unbelievable.

A few months ago, a GPL'd Linux driver was incorporated into the mainline OpenBSD kernel tree (albeit some months before release, and largely non-working.) The Linux developers concerned contacted the OpenBSD team via the regular mailing list, Ccing some relevant Linux and legal people. The email was polite, more or less friendly, and constructive, offering help to the OpenBSD people to ensure the situation was resolved with both projects having a working driver at the end of the day.

The OpenBSD team's response was to go nuclear. Theo called the Linux developers "inhuman". Many argued that the copyright violation was legitimate performing coding acrobatics to pretend that real, copyrighted, code was never being distributed under the BSD license; others argued this proved the superiority of the BSD license because if it had been the other way around, the OpenBSD team would never have objected, given the BSD license allows you to do (apparently) anything, whereas the GPL prevents use in closed systems.

Well, what a bunch of, frankly, hypocritical two-faced liars. The OpenBSD team's response to an apparent BSD license violation (which we were assured would never happen, because the BSD license is so liberal) is to directly accuse the Linux developers of copyright infringement. Rather than involve appropriate mailing lists and relevant people, the complaint is made on the public Undeadly.org website. Rather than offer help, the OpenBSD developers just spit blood. And none acknowledge that the copyright infringement hasn't even happened yet, that is to say, the proposed code is a patch that has yet to be accepted into the mainline kernels.

This is the second time the OpenBSD team have owed Linux developers an apology, and I bet it's the second time we're not going to hear one, instead hearing the same self-righteous fraudulent apologetics we hear one.

OpenBSD developers have time and time again claimed "moral superiority" over GNU and Linux due to their adoption of a license that allows code to be used in closed projects. It always was a specious argument, but it's looking all the more absurd today.

Re:No, it doesn't.

[jimstapleton]

actually, most of them don't have him as the copyright holder.

Looks more like some yutz decided that he didn't like the BSD licence and went in and changed all the licences to GPLv2, in the files, and didn't do anything else.

Honestly, I can't complain, as long as the copyright notices are kept, and unchanged, it is acceptable (someone posted thsi further down).

Nonetheless, someone going in, and doing nothing but removing the BSD licencing on every file (or at least the first 4 or 5, I didn't look through the whole thing), and replcaing it with "this code is now under GPLv2", seems somewhat childish, more like a tantrum than anything else.

Re:Strange

[Eivind Eklund]

The original BSD vaersion is still out there.

Just like it would if the code was taken properitary.

It's a bit rich to deny people to keep their own changes proprietary, wouldn't you say?

Except that's what the GPL tries to do. It's removing freedom.

And that's what many of us BSDers are against. We want our software to keep freedom. Including the freedom of future developers to keep their own changes private, or get paid for them. Thereby, we also allow the end users the freedom to buy those changes - a freedom they wouldn't have if the code was GPLed, because the incentive to make the changes wouldn't be there.

As an example, we have Apples operating system, partially made on code I wrote. And I'm a very happy user of it, even though I (or rather, my employer) had to pay for the extra stuff Apple has added. The ability to do so is a freedom I have partially gotten from having released my software under the BSD license.

Eivind.

It's about dividing the communities....

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSD and GPL communities are two groups with much in common and some differences. That's especially true of the OpenBSD people who are very much committed to freedom for their software (and just disagree with the GPL people about how that is best defined). This kind of article is about trying to set up atificial disagreements between those communities so that they don't cooperate well. I write copyleft software and content (GPL/GFDL/CC-SA) but I would mostly relicence it if an important project like OpenBSD or X.org asked for it. I would make that decision based on the value of the project. If I feel that a project is harmful overall then I probably wouldn't.

The trick is that we have to not be divided and work together sensibly.

Re:It's about dividing the communities....

[PinkPanther]

[OpenBSD people] just disagree with the GPL people about how that is best defined

It isn't so much a disagreement about how "free" is defined; it is more about who the target of "free" is. The BSD-style folks focus on programmers; the GPL-style folks future end-users. Both want the code to be "free" (can do whatever they desire with the code) to their target.

Re:Hmmmm

[MysteriousPreacher]

OpenBSD developers have time and time again claimed "moral superiority" over GNU and Linux due to their adoption of a license that allows code to be used in closed projects. It always was a specious argument, but it's looking all the more absurd today.

Claiming any particular licence (BSD/GPL) to be superior is like asserting that cars are superior to helicopters. In far too many cases, the licences are dragged in to try to justify a bad argument, and the fault lies with both camps. GNU and BSD zealots alike adopt Talibanesque positions that do nothing but harm to the community.

This story should have been a simple clear-cut case it weren't for a small rabble-rousing group. Funnily enough, Theo posted a fairly decent and non-inflamatory respones in the early discussions. This is in stark contrast to the earlier GPL case (mentioned in your post) where his reaction was indefensible.

Incidentally, the BSD licence infringement has already taken place. That happened as soon as the author distributed the code with the licence stripped from it. Doesn't matter whether or not it hit a main-stream kernel. As soon as he made it available to others, distribution kicked-in. That said, the author has a case to answer for but certainly not the entire Linux community the "OMG LINUX STOLE OUR CODE!" crowd would have us think.

Re:Strange

[bentcd]

Except that's what the GPL tries to do. It's removing freedom.
And that's what many of us BSDers are against. We want our software to keep freedom. Freedom isn't binary, nor can it easily be discussed without qualifiers. In this case, BSD is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it for myself, and who cares what everyone else does with it" whileas GPL is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it to rest with the end user of my software and never mind if that causes me some inconvenience in the process". They are different kinds of freedom, resting in different parts of the software ecosystem.

Re:No... It's about something a little different..

[Phroggy]

A patch to existing code would be considered a derivative work. Correct.

Derivative works all belong to the original copyright owner. No matter who wrote them. Only partially correct. Derivative works belong to both the original copyright owner AND the author of the derivative work. I can take BSD-licensed code, hack it however I like, and release the result as a proprietary application, as long as I give proper attribution as required under the BSD license. Doing so does NOT give the authors of the BSD code the right to use my derivative code for free; they'd have to buy it from me at whatever price I set (if I choose to offer it for sale). Although I have to comply with their license in order to use their code in this way, they don't own the result.

This is what keeps someone from trying to add in a patch that has a different license from original GPL work. By submitting a patch, you're implicitly granting a license for your code to be included with the project, under the same license(s) as the rest of the project, but you still hold the copyright on your code. Some projects have legal wording to clarify their policy on accepting patches, but this is how things are generally understood to work.

The original licensee does not allow it. The inclusion of BSD-licensed code in GPL-licensed software is perfectly fine, as long as the conditions of the BSD license are met. In this case, it sounds like the conditions of the BSD license may not have been met. The author of most of the driver took the whole thing (including patches owned by other people and licensed under the BSD license), and tried to relicense the whole thing under GPLv2 without dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. The idea of what he was trying to do is totally OK, but a couple of details may not have been handled correctly and might need to be fixed.

Doing the same thing in the other direction (including GPL-licensed code in a BSD-licensed project) is a no-no, by the way. The GPL has additional requirements that the BSD license doesn't satisfy.