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More conversation linksMore conversation linksPosted Aug 27, 2004 19:46 UTC (Fri) by lucat (guest, #15102)In reply to: More conversation links by rfunk Parent article: Linux loses the Philips webcam driver
The post of Nemsoft seems very childish to me. I can understand his point of view... but not when he demands that a piece of code that HE opensourced of his own will would be removed from the Kernel.
He might not have fully understood GPL, you just cannot withdraw it once you have GPLed your code. He has no right to demand the removal of the opensource part of the module. No one is going to change his copyright notice, but for sure he cannot ask them to remove it.
He says that his NDA expired one year ago, then he claims that he cannot GPL it anyways... at this point i must believe that HE does NOT want to opensource it... i don't know why... his fears of a legal battle with Philips simply don't stand. His NDA expired, he is FREE now to fully opensource the driver. Maybe he forgot what Linux is but for sure, from his requests, he forgot what GPL is.
Following his way to think then the Kernel guys could demand him to stop using Linux at all since it is their work... of course they will not, since they DO understand GPL.
Unfortunately i have one of the webcams that work with the PWC driver... until Philips will opensource the decompression algorithm i'll stop buying ANY Philips device. This will probably not solve anything, it will probably not make them change mind about opensourcing a dumb compression algorithm, but i for sure don't want to have to depend on them on my future hardware.
Bye,
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More conversation links Posted Aug 27, 2004 20:01 UTC (Fri) by wcooley (guest, #1233) [Link] He did not demand the removal; he asked and it was removed as a matter of courtesy and because it has no maintainer. Because it is open source, users are still able to use the patch (if you can find it, which I'm sure you can). You are also free to continue maintaining and developing it. If you read the e-mail Greg linked to below, you'll see he would accept the patch back with a new maintainer.
More conversation links Posted Aug 27, 2004 20:12 UTC (Fri) by lucat (guest, #15102) [Link] > In case the answer is "No", then I will:> - demand that the PWC driver is removed from any further Linux kernel > releases; Open source or not, it"s still _my_ work.
It looks like a demand to me.
Bye,
More conversation links Posted Aug 27, 2004 20:19 UTC (Fri) by lucat (guest, #15102) [Link] I also want to add this... it seems to me that Nemosoft believes that the contract that he signed with Philips (the _expired_ NDA) is more important than the contract that he signed with everyone of us (the GPL).He can for sure think this... it is his right to do so... but this should also warn us that accepting closed-source code inside the Kernel will make our hardware dependent on the decisions of a particular company. When they will stop supporting new Kernel versions we will be forced to change our perfectly working hardware... this is unacceptable to me (when i buy something i want to be free to use it how i want and for how long i want) and this is why we should strongly oppose binary-only drivers in Linux. This is my opinion at least.
Bye,
More conversation links Posted Aug 30, 2004 3:58 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] The GPL is not a contract, it's a license to copy.
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