BSD->GPL Relicense Follow Up

Spacemonkey — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:06:00 +0000

In a previous article I mentioned a spat between some BSD developers and some GPL developers, with the SFLC getting pulled in to find a resolution.

It does appear that a resolution has been found, and it looks like the right thing was done.

Logic Prevailed.

In an excellent follow-up article at Linux-Watch by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, the SFLC asked for a quiet period to finish their research and analysis of the situation.

This of course allowed tempers to cool off (I’ve seen Eben do that before, because it was me and it worked) and provided minimal distraction for the SFLC to investigate and collect the data needed for their findings:

There the matter has sat until now. According to the SFLC, “All the copyright holders of the Linux ath5k-driver code, derived from ar5k, have been contacted and have agreed to license their changes under the ISC license, thus allowing improvements to be re-incorporated into OpenBSD. One of the three historical branches of the code reviewed by SFLC, however, included portions that are only licensed under the GPL, and SFLC has determined that it would be very difficult to re-incorporate that code into OpenBSD.”

You can read the analysys of the wireless driver’s development history at the SFLC site directly. Talk about transparency!

Ath5k-driver (discussed in Section 2) currently carried by Linville represents a clear and documented line of descent from ar5k to an ath5k driver for Linux. In addition, all new copyright holders in ath5k-driver code have been contacted and have agreed to license their changes to the ar5k-derived files under the ISC license.9 SFLC has provided a patch to Linville that provides correct attributions for all copyright holders in question. Therefore, SFLC recommends that development under the ISC license continue from what is currently in Linville’s commit c1928199c27de433d1e81b78e3178be4f0e978d2 in his ath5k branch of the wireless-legacy git repository.

I was unsure if the SFLC would take this course, and it is a pleasant read for me, as the SFLC demonstrates an understanding and cooperative approach to non-GPL projects.

Perhaps the most useful of this all is their article about originality requirements which discusses what they believe are reasonable and logical guidelines for determining the copyright status of software.

As well, they have published a guideline for developers who wish to maintain permissive-licensed files in a GPL project.

These last two documents are of great importance to the open source developer community, and I recommend every single one of you take the time to read these. They have thoughtfully been provided in PDF and PS formats for reading offline or printing.

Excellent, excellent work done by the SFLC.

Open Source Hypocrisy: Tag ar5k

BSD->GPL Relicense Follow Up

Logic Prevailed.