GPL Hindering Two-Way Code Sharing?

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has some fascinating coverage of the recent rift between the OpenBSD developers and the Linux kernel developers. Proponents of the GPL defend their license for enforcing that their code can always be shared. However in the current debate the GPL is being added to BSD-licensed code, thereby preventing it from being shared back with the original authors of the code. Thus, a share-and-share-alike license is effectively preventing two-way sharing." We discussed an instance of this one-way effect a few days back.

Comments

Linux is theft?

[saskboy]

This is something that the Linux community doesn't need, because if another open source project starts accusing Linux of using stolen code, us Linux promoters will lose our "moral" highground. Sometimes that's all we have, since we still don't have a marketing machine needed to push Linux into millions of homes.

Err, no

[RAMMS EIN]

``Proponents of the GPL defend their license for enforcing that their code can always be shared. However in the current debate the GPL is being added to BSD-licensed code, thereby preventing it from being shared back with the original authors of the code. Thus, a share-and-share-alike license is effectively preventing two-way sharing.''

Err, no. What is preventing the two-way sharing is (1) people using the GPL with (portions of) the code in a originally BSD-licensed project, and (2) the people in the original project not being willing to accept the GPL-ed code.

This has much more to do with people being uncooperative than it has with the licenses per se. Taking a project and adding code to it that cannot be distributed under the project's license is not a very friendly thing to do. On the other hand, if the license permits it (as both the BSD license and the GPL do), you have every right to do so.

In the other direction, there is nothing _really_ preventing the original project from using the code that uses the new license. The only thing is that terms of distributions (etc.) of the original project would have to change to be compatible with the new license. I fully understand if the authors of the original project are unwililng to do this. However, "we are unwilling to do X" and "it is impossible to do X" are not the same thing.

Since this discussion (probably) started with the whole saga surrounding the Atheros driver, I would like to point out that that story is a bit more complicated than what I have pointed out above. So please, don't reply to this post with details about the Atheros driver case; that's not what I'm talking about.