GPL Code Found In OpenBSD Wireless Driver 671
NormalVisual writes "The mailing lists were buzzing recently when Michael Buesch, one of the maintainers for the GPL'd bc43xx Broadcom wireless chip driver project, called the OpenBSD folks to task for apparently including code without permission from his project in the OpenBSD bcw project, which aims to provide functionality with Broadcom wireless chips under that OS. It seems that the problem has been resolved for now with the BSD driver author totally giving up on the project and Theo De Raadt taking the position that Buesch's posts on the subject were 'inhuman.'" More commentary from the BSD community is over at undeadly.org.
Summary: Theo went over the top (Score:5, Informative)
The whole thing lasted two days, much less than the blog and news coverage. Someone will come along and write this driver for BSD, and the BSD developer will have some well-deserved cooling-off time.
Bruce
Typo, and more data. (Score:4, Informative)
And by the way, first post :-) . OK, I'm a subscriber, I guess that's cheating.
Here is the Technocrat.net discussion [technocrat.net] of the same issue.
Bruce
Re:Summary: Theo went over the top (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there is a time and place for flame wars. Justified anger is better than sitting aside while bad stuff happens. But this particular encounter did not justify the anger Theo displayed.
Bruce
Re:I am amazed (Score:5, Informative)
It is. This leaves the question of whether you are OK with some people who refuse to share. If the answer is no, use GPL. If yes, use BSD. You also have the option of using GPL, and asking for money from those who prefer exchanging money over sharing code, as MySQL does with its dual-licensing.
Bruce
BSD licence issue (Score:2, Informative)
Silly (Score:5, Informative)
The crux of Theo's complaint seems to be that they "went public" by emailing too many people. When some of the people in on the email pointed out that they were the ones that actually did the hard work of reverse-engineering, Theo said:
Wow. Just, wow. I often agree with Theo even when he's being a knob because he's usually got a point. But in this case, he's been embarrassed, and he is using whatever he can think of as an incredibly flimsy excuse to attack the people whom the OpenBSD developer plagiarised. What a childish, unproductive attitude. Pulling the code and giving up on the driver instead of taking them up on their offer to relicense the code is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and worse for your users. Just take your ball and go home, Theo.
The war against BSD continues (Score:2, Informative)
Thank god for ndiswrapper (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Summary of the Facts (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The BSD folks seem to be whiners (Score:5, Informative)
Following the E-Mail Thread (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the OpenBSD people were put off by this, which is unfortunate. And apparently they were so focused on making it yet another OpenBSD vs The World incident that they completely lost sight of the goal of both projects, which is to create Free and Open drivers for other people to use, despite the hardware specifications not being available. It's an unfortunate situation, of course.
Hopefully after everyone has a chance to reflect on the situation, the OpenBSD developers will realize that even though many other situations are actually OpenBSD vs The World, this is not one of them, and the Linux bcm-43xx team was not only willing to work with them on relicensing code, they also published the results of an incredible reverse engineering effort for anyone, including the OpenBSD team, to use in order to achieve this goal.
Re:This is the worst possible offense in open sour (Score:4, Informative)
I'll admit it, I've done that very thing (copy some code in order to bootstrap a project). But I put all sorts of comments around tainted code, and I make damned sure that every single line of tainted code is rewritten before that code, or a product based on it, is released into the wild.
Theo and Marcus both come across as graceless and petulant children. At least Marcus decided to be childish quietly. Theo's ongoing rants about "the inhumanity" of it all just get hysterical after a few posts. Yes, the original email probably should have been more private. But the response from Theo is completely and utterly over the top.
Regards,
Ross
Re:Summary of the Facts (Score:3, Informative)
None of these facts are relevant to the discussion. The sole issue is that Michael Buesch made a public spectacle out of Marcus' mistake. It should have been addressed privately between developers, and then broadcast publicly if discussions were unsuccessful. Regardless of whether you believe Marcus' actions were a mistake or a theft, you must give someone with his track record the benefit of the doubt. By embarrassing him publicly, Michael destroyed Marcus' motivation to work in bcw(4) and benefit the non-GPL user communities.
Even Jeff Garzik, one of the bcm43xx developers, admitted that Michael's actions were wrong [gmane.org]. It's unfortunate that Michael Beusch is more concerned about defending his actions than correcting the injustice.
However Theo's first reaction was to turn the situation into an attack on Micheal. Note in the first email Theo sent his first suggestion of how the problem may be resolved was "Maybe he'll just delete the driver and quit even trying, because you chose to cc so many people, and malign him. Maybe he'll simply replace every single line that looks similar, and then he could rightly not even mention any of the efforts of people like you". So his first suggestion is that the developer quit, his second is that the developer remove any GPL code from the driver (denying the GPL authors credit is given as a prominent benefit here). No where in the email does he directly acknowledge the option that the bcm43xx developers did give, to relicense a bunch of that code under BSD. To me it sounds like Theo had no interest in coming to a constructive solution and instead was just trying to turn the situation around into an attack on Micheal and the others. Note that despite sending the email in a public forum their entire dialog was very polite, constrained, and actually trying to find a solution. The only other thing they could be faulted was stating their belief that the copying was deliberate and the developer knew he was violating the GPL, considering the developer was an experienced BSD contributor I'd say these beliefs are valid.
Note that by the time Marcus had gotten around to responding (no idea if he was hesitating or if he hadn't read his email yet) Theo had already turned the thread into a full flame war (with him doing all the flaming). Also Theo had already presented the idea, multiple times, that Marcus just quit and never acknowledged the idea of asking the original authors to re-license some of the code (which they repeatedly said they would do) as a valid solution. In my opinion Micheal Buesch bears very little responsibility for the developer quiting, Theo basically left him with no other option (besides contradicting him).
Re:Broadcom using bcm43xx code? Hah! (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it is. Of course, most people don't realise this, because the evil, inhuman Michael Busch used his time machine to travel back to 2005 and plant fake mailing list archives [berlios.de] saying that the reason they chose the GPL over the BSD license was because they didn't want it taken proprietary especially by Broadcom [berlios.de], because of particular features of the open driver [berlios.de], when we all know it's just an evil, inhuman plot against Theo and OpenBSD. Thanks for alerting us to this deviousness, AC!
Re:Summary of the Facts (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, a number of times Theo characterised their complaint as being about copyrighted whitespace and variable names, even after being told to look at the code. Example:
Re:Broadcom using bcm43xx code? Hah! (Score:5, Informative)
How any code from a reverse engineered spec that blatantly just guesses at a lot of things is better than something written with the docs is far beyond me.
I'm going to venture a guess that you're either not a professional software engineer, or still fresh out of college and very low on real world experience, then. At the very least, you've seen the codebases at very few companies, or you've just been very, very lucky.
I've had to throw out code and start fresh because the original code I was given was code that had been written originally years ago by an outside contractor brought in to do it, then maintained for the next two years by the hardware engineers themselves, under the premise that they're engineers, they've got a C compiler and a SAMS book, what more qualifications did they need? I was brought in because they couldn't figure out how to add some new features they wanted. The reason wasn't because the new features were tricky, the reason was the code was so hacked up it was impossible to change anything without breaking everything else. Alas, this level of code is all too common at companies that see their primary product as hardware rather than software.
I've also seen horribly base code that needed to be replaced at companies that had paid software engineers maintaining it the whole time. Why do you think the fact that they were paid software engineers somehow magically makes their code any better? It was crap, and the only reason they were able to get away with it was because no one outside their department ever saw it. There's no easier way to hide bad coding than to work inside a corporation on proprietary software. It's the easiest place in the world for it to occur, and often the hardest place in the world to get incompetent engineers off a project.
Re:Well, Theo is something of an asshat (Score:3, Informative)
Well, where's my DSM? Oh, that's right, I'm not qualified to use one.
There is a lot of speculation that a number of people we know are somewhere on the Asperger spectrum of disorders.
Bruce
Not his fault? Is he a ward of the state? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with you on this. The way Mr. de Raadt treats other human beings is simply abusive, and there is no external factor than can explain his behavior in any fashion that would justify coddling it. Unless you are seriously willing to argue that the man is not, in a legal sense, mentally competent, then it is most certainly a problem that lies at his feet, and we should take no pity on him for it. To do otherwise is to suggest that he isn't, frankly, sane.
Re:Overreactions... (Score:2, Informative)
The recipients list looks perfectly fine to me:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wirele
.
Re:Summary: Theo went over the top (Score:4, Informative)
The GPL is different in that regards. If I saw GPL code in a BSD project, and the GPL code was not marked as such, I would have no way of knowing that it would be illegal for me to take that code and treat it as BSD code. As such, any GPL code added to a mostly-BSD-licensed project must be marked explicitly as such.
I don't know what the issue with the Virgin WebPlayer is, but the others are all BSD-licensed code added to a GPL project, which doesn't require any specific notification beyond the BSD license appearing somewhere.
Re:Summary: Theo went over the top (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Summary: Theo went over the top (Score:3, Informative)
bad career choice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Broadcom using bcm43xx code? Hah! (Score:1, Informative)
Hahahaha... that's one of the funniest things I've ever read. Have you ever actually used any closed-source device drivers?
In my experience, open-source drivers (whether reverse-engineered or done with vendor assistance) tend to kick the crap out of closed-source drivers. For example, my Acer box uses the nForce4 chipset. When I (briefly) had windows XP installed on this box, the proprietary drivers for the on-board ethernet were a steaming pile of unstable crap. I switched to Ubuntu and the reverse-engineered forcedeth driver has been working perfectly for me since. Likewise with a lot of TV tuner cards, which come with atrocious windows drivers/software, but many work fine with rev-eng'ed Linux drivers. And how about my Epson printer, which forces me to use awful hack-job Epson GUIs under windows, but "just works" with the Epson CUPS drivers.
The reasons are pretty simple: hardware vendors make their money by selling hardware, and they'll ship it out the door with pretty much any pathetic excuse for a driver. Subsequently, they have little incentive to keep maintaining and improving the drivers. By contrast, once an open-source driver is released, it will keep getting improved by interested and capable parties. By and large, the people who reverse-engineer hardware or write FLOSS drivers tend to actually *use* it, and they tend to put a lot of thought and talent into it.
Trolls on both sides (Score:5, Informative)
First, let me say that I am totally shattered and disappointed. I am doing work in both the Linux and BSD communities, and this is by far one of the most destructive flamewar I have ever witnessed. It will be hard to repair the damage done... This is very sad.
It's only fair to note that while there has been lots of stupid flaming on the OpenBSD side as usual, the linux bcw developers, while trying to appear rather nice and careful on the public mailing lists, where laughing their asses off about the whole thing behind the scenes in their IRC channel. They didn't exactly try hard to keep things peaceful either.
http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/irc-logs/bcm-sphttp://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/irc-logs/bcm-sp
http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/irc-logs/bcm-sp
http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/irc-logs/bcm-sp
Some quotes, the first one actually shows the igniting spark. Others show how people enjoyed watching the flames.I find it disgusting that some people seemed to enjoy watching an already brittle relationship between two deeply related communities fall into pieces. Do they also throw stones at public demonstrations and then go home to watch the riots on telly?
Re:Theo is an idiot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not his fault? Is he a ward of the state? (Score:3, Informative)
Paraphrase (with accurate chronology):
Michael (in public):
The OpenBSD BCM driver contains GPL'd code. Here are 12 examples of code copied verbatim from our source tree.
Theo (also in public):
Are you saying you want Marcus to quit? Why did you CC so many people?
Stefano:
This is a major GPL violation. We just want it resolved. We'd love to see a clean OpenBSD BCM driver!
Theo:
Why are you trying to drag Marcus through the mud? Do you want him to quit?
Joseph:
Theo, Michael CC'd us because we're part of the BCM reversing team. Can we help you clean the driver up?
Theo:
So you think Marcus should quit?!
Joseph:
No, we just said the opposite.
Theo:
And I ask again, do you see any reason why this whole rant accusing Marcus of copyright violations should have landed in your mailbox?
Michael:
Theo, we don't want you guys to give up! Just work with us to clean up the licensing status of the code!
Theo:
You're too late. Marcus quit. Are you not human? Are you surprised?
Michael:
Little bit, yeah. This was a major GPL violation, and it doesn't seem like an accident. Why are you arguing about it?
Theo:
Why are you still calling Marcus a thief?
Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how Marcus could be so thin-skinned as to be hurt by a GPL challenge, and yet somehow work on the same team as Theo. Presumably, Marcus never actually talked to Theo. It's all for the best, then. Marcus will be happier someplace else.