Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 7:44 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

> The benefits from such an act would likely outweigh any cost associated with allowing unwanted proprietary use of the code which has been added to this driver.

I don't know... It does seem true ethically in this case, however, suppose the idea gets, by a magic, universally adopted in the both camps. In N years, the result would be a major part of the kernel distributable under either BSD or GPL, which, for all practical purposes, means BSD for a company wanting to take the code proprietary. Wouldn't it kill the GPL spirit??

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Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:40 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (3 responses)

The "major part" would consist of drivers for some hardware, mostly obsolete by then. Why would any company need to close a driver for a 802.11g card once 802.11n is a mature standard? And for that matter, why would that company base its business on a reverse engineered driver instead of buying the software and the documentation from the chipset manufacturer?

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 18:10 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (2 responses)

> The "major part" would consist of drivers for some hardware

Why? Do you say that if, hypothetically, the entire BSD tree becomes compatible with GPL, there is nothing worth to be used in the Linux kernel except an occasional hardware driver here and there?

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 6, 2007 1:00 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

Yes, that's what I'm saying. It's just not worth the trouble to replace any deep Linux internals with the BSD code, even if the BSD code is better. Even in the case of drivers it's only the code dealing with the hardware that is going to be shared.

Actually, I think that the drivers are more likely to be dual licensed because it's unlikely that they will be closed sourced. What company would need to close source of the Atheros driver? On the other hand, more generic code will likely stay under GPL only because the risk of closing it would be higher if it were dual-licensed.

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 7, 2007 17:29 UTC (Fri) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link]

The entire BSD tree is already compatible with the GPL. Licensing isn't the issue in BSD -> Linux code migration. Earlier on, the point was to try to craft something new and make it work well. Later on, Linux was sufficiently diverged from BSD that the amount of code that could be made common was limited. This divergence only increases with time.