Resolution of BSD-GPL Wireless Code Dispute?

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 2, 2007 @08:08AM from the can't-we-all-just-get-along dept.

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.

1 of 215 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Great. Can we move on now? by raddan · 2007-10-02 08:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

There is one good thing that comes out of this: collaboration between BSD and Linux developers on wireless drivers. The licensing issue was bound to happen sooner or later on some piece of code. It's good that it happened early on in a project and with only bruised egos to show for it.

Wireless support in OpenBSD is outstanding. You can use ifconfig to manage your wireless devices just like you can for wired interfaces. I don't know a whole lot about OpenHAL, but if it works the way wireless does in OpenBSD, common libraries are simply reused so that developers can get new drivers up and running quickly. This will be a good thing for Linux, and the additional attention will improve wireless support for both platforms.