[nycbug-talk] Linux driver violates BSD license

Dru dlavigne6 at sympatico.ca
Wed Aug 29 08:26:04 EDT 2007



On Wed, 29 Aug 2007, Ray Lai wrote:

>>> It was under a dual BSD/GPL license, so this is allowed, right?
>>
>> No. Some parts of the Atheros driver were authored by Sam Leffler,
>> and are actually free software. He placed those bits under a 4-term
>> BSD license, plus dual licensed it under the GPL. Still, that does
>> not give anyone except Sam Leffler the right to change that text,
>> on those files.
>>
>> The other files in the driver, written by Reyk, are the replacement
>> for the HAL. This basically is the hidden register access code which
>> Sam (basically employeed by Atheros) refused to release. This code
>> was placed by Reyk under an ISC license, something our project
>> prefers to use since it is so simple that even a grade 5 student
>> cannot misunderstand what it says. It translates to "You can do
>> anything, but not delete the text".
>>
>> Only Reyk could change that copyright notice, since he is the
>> author.


Looks like they're considering rewording, but still not showing the 
original copyright holder:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/29/69

Dru



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