GPL-BSD flamefest over code

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 12 April 2007 09:31

Opinion and Analysis

A flamewar on a free or open source software mailing list isn't all that unusual. There are a lot of people with very fixed ideas on these lists and they are not averse to telling others so - in frank language.

But it's not often that these flamefests break out over allegations of violating licenses. Last week, saw one of these stoushes erupt.

Michael Buesch, the lead developer for the GPL'd Linux wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx) driver, posted a message to a number of mailing lists saying he had found code in OpenBSD's bcw driver which looked similar to what his team had created.

The code created by Buesch's team was under the GPL - meaning that if anyone took any of it and redistributed the same, then it could be done only under the GPL. The OpenBSD licence is pretty licentious - according to Wikipedia, it "allows proprietary commercial use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on the material may even be released under a proprietary license (but still must maintain the license requirements)."

Buesch provided several examples of code which he claimed had been copied and wrote: "We'd like to have this issue resolved. In general we are not against having a free (and BSD licensed) driver in the BSD operating system. But you _have_ to cooperate with us if you'd like to take our code and relicense it under BSD license. We intentionally put the code under GPL license. We did _not_ do this, because "everybody does this". We did this, among other reasons, because we... (citation snipped) 'don't think we should allow proprietary vendors to take our code and close it again'."

Buesch's reasoning was sound; his team had gone to considerable difficulty to reverse engineer a driver for a chipset from a company which has not shown any interest in either providing a driver for Linux or opening the specifications so that someone could write one and Buesch did not want the code getting locked up again - as would be possible if it was released under the BSD licence.