Steve Szmidt wrote: > On Thursday 13 September 2007 16:19, Theo de Raadt wrote: >> > > Reyk can take them to court over this, but he must do it before the >> > > year 2047. >> > >> > Except he took most of it from Sam Leffler who said it is OK to license >> > under the GPL. So while it's good to see you defending your code, it was >> > not entirely yours to start with. >> >> Reyk's work (the replacement HAL) is in seperate files -- it is a >> seperately copyrighted work. > > OK, I see that Reyk wrote it after Sam would not release it. I see that Sam > seemed happy to dual license it. Though it looks clear that Jiri Slaby was > wrong in stripping the license, which subsequently was not accepted by any > repository.
No, Sam's code and Reyk's code are completely different. Sam has an open source driver and a closed source binary blob, the HAL. Reyk reverse engineered the HAL and wrote an open source replacement. Sam DID NOT open the HAL code, it is still a closed binary object. Can you see now why Reyk's code is so critical? Otherwise GPL and BSD developers have to include a binary object into the kernel, which is out of their control. They can not fix bugs in there and make sure it works with present and future kernels. NetBSD had to change their *KERNEL INTERNALS* just to be "compatible" with this one BLOB!: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118818182531027&w=2 So, please go read the Theo's messages again. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118965266709012&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118963284332223&w=2 Multiple versions of wrong handling of copyrights have been done, by several people. All those steps have been published in public repositories. Some pulled back, some still there, Please do not spread incorrect information any more. > This action does not however represent the "GPL community" from what I can > see. Stealing work from one or the other has not been evident other than some > people being confused as to what came from where. Which is the chicken and > which is the egg kind of thing. Yes, this does NOT represent the GPL community. It is a mistake done by a GPL project that is either clueless in terms of how copyrights work, and/or got some bad legal advice. However, what they did is wrong, and the situation is *still* not resolved after all this time. What does represent the GPL community is their inability to deal with such problems. They think that OpenBSD people defending their own copyrights are the "enemies". They fail to see that proper respect to copyrights and an ethical understanding and collaboration between open source projects is vital to the survival of *their* GPL projects. > It is generalities which has bunches of people up in arms which of course > happens when there is not enough specificity. It is pretty safe to say that > most people are honest, but where misunderstanding can occur, it will. I have not seen one coherent response from the "community" that is "up in arms" that hints that they understand the problem. So, this "misunderstanding" looks like a common problem with the bunch. Can -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
