Hi there, On Apr 9, 2007, at 8:43 PM, Robby Workman wrote:
It's not a matter of perspective - forced freedom is not freedom.
That statement also is a matter of perspective. ;-) If you mean by "freedom", the liberty to do whatever you want, then BSD is freedom. If you mean by "freedom", the security that users have the same rights with the code tomorrow they already have today, even if numerous people contribute to the code, the GPL is freedom. GPL is a license that ensures code stays free in the sense of open for users. It doesn't mean you can do with it whatever you want. It's not you that's free, it's the code. That's what I ment with matter of perspective. You don't have to agree with this at all, but at least you have to understand and respect the idea and that other people contribute to this model. It's nothing that should be rejected like I have the impression it is done by many stubborn people on this list.
To ignore the possibility that it was an honest mistake is part of the problem. I won't claim to know what Marcus Glocker was thinking, but it seems quite plausible that he had every intention of removing the infringing code prior to making the bcw(4) work public, but in the excitement of some initial positive results, he simply forgot. Either way, he admitted that a mistake had been made. The reason (as I see it - again, I won't speak for anyone else) that the OpenBSD community came down so hard on the bcm43xx dev is due to the way he pursued the issue. There was absolutely no good reason to initially address the issue on a public mailing list and CC'd to a bunch of other people. If the initial mail had been sent privately to Marcus, then he could/would have removed the infringing code (or perhaps the entire driver temporarily). He could have then issued a public statement on *why* he did it (which would have satisfied the need to have it out in public that some of the code wasn't actually BSD licensed). Had it happened that way, everybody wins, and we don't have all of this fuss over it.
Yes, that's exactly what I have been talking about on undeadly when that stupid "death of a driver" article was published to promote the myth. The reason why I'm bothering to participate in this discussion at all, is that many people claiming to take the "OpenBSD side" in this argument are actually no better than the bcm43xx devs when they had the idea to go public. This whole issue has been escalated primarily by OpenBSD folks, not the other way around. I'd say it's time to simply drop it.
kind regards, Tobias W.
