bcm43xx copyright infrigment in OpenBSD
- Published April 7th, 2007 in Tech Comment, Free Software
Usually I’m just a spectator of the chit chat rivalries between GPL and BSD which are frequently resurrected as Linux vs OpenBSD battles.
But the latest one was too much for me to be quiet.
OpenBSD clearly infringed copyright by direct copying the bcm43xx source code and changing it’s license to BSD. Although both BSD and GPL are Free/Open Source licenses, the latter does not allow one to make the drivers proprietary again — which in this case would mean commercializing Michael’s and others (the authors of the bcm43xx Linux driver) hours of hobby work (which were certainly a lot for reverse-engineering the wireless device, follow the scarce open specification, etc..). Damn, that’s why it’s GPL in the first place — they DON’T want it to become proprietary software again.
Since everything is public, Michael sent an email to the public linux-wireless mailing list kindly asking for a legal settlement — perhaps relicensing parts of the code as BSD (yes, Michael even gave the chance of giving certain parts of the code as BSD!), etc..
What happens next? Theo de Rat drops in adding noise to the whole conversation. If you skip his emails on the whole thread you end knowing precisely the same. By the same time, the developer of the bcm43xx OpenBSD driver skulls and drops the project. If you stop at this point, you may feel pity — oh, he abandoned the project.
In my opinion, licenses are to be respected. If you don’t want to respect it, don’t use it. I don’t like the fact that one might make proprietary software out of open source software and for this reason I don’t use *BSD OSs. The other way should also hold. We know OpenBSD and especially Theo de Rat hate (let me emphasize it as the way it is — HATE) GPL. You have the right to hate. But, please, don’t disrespect it. Thanks.
Why do I come in if I’m not a Linux or OpenBSD contributor? Because I, as a user and contributor to the GPL license pool, feel that the Free/Open Source software is something great and is to be respected. If it’s not respected within inside, it will never be respected from the outside — which would mean more work for gpl-violations.org. Please help us keep the FLOSS world a sane environment.
“I don’t like the fact that one might make proprietary software out of open source software”
That sounds a bit hypocritical since the OS you love so much does exactly that[1], so you may want to rephrase it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel
Apple, that actually could be doing that, releases the Darwin sources. In this case, it does not apply.
Here’s the reasoning: someone produces open source software, a company turns it into proprietary stuff and sells it. On Apple’s case, Apple did Darwin, used FreeBSD userland tools and kept everything open (except the high level libraries that were solely made by Apple). So, the one’s we might be afraid off actually contributed instead of stealing.
So, basically, it does not apply to Mac OS X.