Resolution of BSD-GPL Wireless Code Dispute?

An anonymous reader writes "The highly publicized debate between Theo de Raadt and the Software Freedom Law Center seems to have come to an amicable end. SFLC has published its research on the lineage of the ath5k driver and determined who owns which changes. In the end, everyone agreed to license their modifications to the Linux driver under the BSD license, and OpenBSD developers can now reincorporate those improvements into the original code (with the exception of one historically GPL-licensed branch)." The article notes that Theo de Raadt has not responded publicly to this development but that comments on the issue in an OpenBSD Journal forum have been generally positive.

Comments

Err? iwl4965 works fine

[Krischi]

The Intel cards are among the best-supported wireless cards on Linux. The new one has been supported for a while now by the iwl4965 driver. It is in Ubuntu Gutsy (which is quite stable already, btw), and Gentoo, just to name two distributions.

Oh, and I am typing this on WPA-PSK with the native iwl4965 driver on x86-64, without any hacks or tweaks.

This is way simpler than that.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

It seems kind of petty to whine about someone stealing your code if you're releasing it under the BSD license though. By using the BSD license instead of the GPL you're choosing to let people take from you without giving back.

If I release my code under a BSD-style license, the fact that I allow you to use my code in nearly any way you want doesn't mean that I allow you to steal the credit for my work. This is really what this issue boils down to, which people repeatedly seem to miss.

The OpenBSD side's legal allegations are that first that their code was taken without attribution (stripping the original author's copyright notices), that somebody who doesn't own their code acted as if they did (by changing the license notice to GPL only), and then that even when the original notices were more or less restored, there was a claim to owning part of the work in question (by adding additional copyright and license notices), when there were (by their allegation) no original contributions, and thus, no part of the released work that was owned by anybody other than the BSD folk.