> IMO this is a vindication of the principle that being a jerk doesn't > necessarily make you wrong: Michael should have handled this differently > (especially given the state of the driver at the time), but he does have > a responsibility to protect his license. It seems to be a big concern to > him that the hardware vendor not be able to use his software, so the GPL > is the correct license for his work. I have trouble imagining a > situation where I wouldn't want a hardware vendor to use my code if it > worked better, but he's the author so it's his decision to make.
This is the absolute lamest argument that I have ever heard. What makes you think that Michael Douche has written anything "better" than broadcom? Granted there are better vendors out there but I am willing to bet money that broadcom has better engineers working on their products than some random dude working on a driver without docs and available engineers to bounce questions of. I am sure his "magical" sequence is like super good. I for one am glad that Marcus deleted the code; I would have done it immediately after that email and responded with the cvs delete message to an even wider audience and no explanation of my rationale. What you people seem to miss in the whole discussion here is that Linux people contact vendors IN PRIVATE if they find GPL violations yet a valuable member of the open source community does not get the same courtesy. Only bad things happen when one looks at Linux code. This is yet another example of it. This also underscores once more that Linux as a community is dead.
