- Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective GPL-BSD stoush: de Raadt hints at legal action
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective GPL-BSD stoush: de Raadt hints at legal action | GPL-BSD stoush: de Raadt hints at legal action |
|
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 14 September 2007 | |
|
Page 1 of 2 De Raadt wrote to me after reading what I had written about the stoush. For de Raadt, there is more than one string to this bow: a dual-licence discussion and a question of the GPL being wrapped around an OpenBSD developer's work. And he is now hinting at going to court to sort out the matter. The argument arose over changes in code for the Atheros wireless driver. The snippet of code in question was written by one Sam Leffler - who had allowed his code to be distributed under either the GPL or BSD licence. On that score, de Raadt had nothing further to say. However, he contends that Jiri Slaby, the developer who released the driver under the GPL, was not entitled to claim copyright as the changes he had made were "100% adaptation and editorial changes to the code. Jiri (sic) work is not original in nature, and we believe that he is not permitted to assert copyright on the derivative product." The driver in question contained code from three people before the controversy arose - Reyk Floeter, Nick Kossifidis and Leffler. De Raadt says he wrote to Eben Moglen, the head of the Software Freedom Law Centre, to resolve the issue. In one email to Moglen, he writes thus: "Now that the files can be found in a PUBLISHED repository, some people are now reading the files of Reyk's which you have wrapped a GPL license around. Since it is a published repository, it is obviously no longer a proposition. Publication has perhaps occured (sic)." After quoting from published material to define the limits of copyright and where it would be applicable, de Raadt went on to issue what looks like a threat: "Furthermore, I urge you to understand that Reyk is a German citizen, and that Germany (like the rest of the world outside the US) impliments (sic) the Berne convention much more strictly than the US does, including in particular these details which come under the subsection of Moral Rights. German law would apply in this case, because that is where Reyk would file against the Linux developers in question." He went on: "Some of those files which have had a GPL placed on them are Reyk's work, with basically only a few small editorial changes, and then a GPL placed at the top. I sure hope that you are not making a mistake of placing a copyright on something in an illegal fashion. There are penalties, and Linux will suffer greatly from the PR." |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
