On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 10:22 -0400, ericfurman@fastmail.net wrote:

quoted text
> They stated that they don't want Broadcom to take their work and close

> it. Why do they care? What possible difference does it make?

> Broadcom will get a driver that actually works well?

What do you care if that's what they care about? Don't forget that the

desire to keep proprietary vendors from forking and re-closing code was

precisely and explicitly the reason the GPL was written; someone who

values that is probably going to choose the GPL to release their work

under. Complaining that Developer X chooses to use the GPL is as useless

as complaining that Vendor Y chooses not to release source code at all.

In both cases it's a license that is at odds with the purpose and

principles of OpenBSD, and in both cases it's a violation of those

authors' rights to copy their code in a manner they have not licensed

you to.
I'm not trying to come across as some sort of GPL cheerleader. I don't

use it except when contracts stipulate it (and more do than you might

think, given your "they can't make money" statement) and I think this

situation is a good example of why the GPL bad for code trees with

multiple authors (which is going to be any code tree of significant

complexity that accepts patches). If one guy writes something and

chooses to place it under the GPL, he can then relicense in a situation

like this; if there end up being 40 authors of a module it's impractical

to track every one of them down if they haven't handed their copyright

over to a primary maintainer, especially if all you really know about

somebody is their public key and email address 3 years ago when they

committed last.
But all those complaints don't mean anything at all: I wasn't an author

for the Linux driver so I don't get a say in how the Linux driver is

licensed. The people who did the work to write it get to decide under

what terms it can be redistributed, and once they have decided that they

have a responsibility to see it is enforced. They don't have to CC

hundreds of people on their first mailing like this guy did, but then

again they have a right to do so if they want to. Just like I have a

right to think they're jerks for doing that.
Weldon
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