Steven Harms

9 Comments

• #1 by Rob Beckett on April 6, 2007 - 5:25 pm

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  A sad situation, hopefully the issues will be resolved, I believe the linux guys went the wrong way about it, but it’s too late now.

  On a side note, I couldn’t help but notice that when reading the thread regarding the whole debacle, that “Theo de Raadt” reminded me of one of those “Poisonous” people on a recent Google Tech Talk ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645 ) – sure, people are angry over this whole issue, but when every single bloomin’ reply is to lambast Michael Buesch & Co – at the end of the day, is that really productive or helpful to the situation?

• #2 by jdodson on April 6, 2007 - 5:30 pm

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  i dont think this is too insane. he maybe could have just talked to the developer directly, but blogging about isnt giving openbsd a good name either.

  its takes two to make a flame war.

• #3 by admin on April 6, 2007 - 6:07 pm

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  I post on the planet to show the community how GPL violations should not be handled. Not a flame war.

• #4 by nixternal on April 6, 2007 - 7:09 pm

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  did anyone get a chance to read the original email? I have to side with the bcm43xx guys. They use the GPL v2 for the bcm43xx drivers and what happened was the BSD guys borrowed their code and put it under the BSD license which isn’t free like the GPL. It was in violation accordingly. If you read the original email sent you will also see that the bcm43xx guys want to work with the BSD folks to get it implemented correctly and legally. To me, the BSD folks went overboard and published a cheap attempt at an attack.

  https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2007-April/004359.html

  That is the email in its entirety. Michael Beusch is correct in confronting them about this. So if anything, I think BSD just lost some credibility.

• #5 by Stoffe on April 6, 2007 - 9:00 pm

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  Actually, reading up on it, it doesn’t seem like the Linux developer should be given a bad name…

• #6 by admin on April 6, 2007 - 9:13 pm

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  I was the way it was handled. There should have been a private email first. Not CC everyone on earth.

  Also the code was not in a working state, they just had it in cvs because they were figuring out how things worked.

• #7 by S. Kochen on April 7, 2007 - 12:38 pm

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  Who really gives damn about who’s CC’d?

  If Marcus went out and corrected the mistake, it wouldn’t have harmed his status at all. In fact I think it would only make him look like a responsible person.

  Theo is just reinforcing his public image of an asshole there.

• #8 by jldugger on April 7, 2007 - 9:33 pm

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  Really, what’s worse is when you look at the thread, Theo dominates. All this over a question of who gets CC’d, none of it over how to work with them to solve it. Afaict, they’re all co copyright holders. It’s just how the kernel works. It would be presumptuous for Buecher to attempt to negotiate the entire code, and inefficient to hold several talks in private.

  Last I knew, the openBSD venue was not a private CVS, so they were in effect redistributing the code under a different license without permission. And you don’t need commits to CVS to study. This is a failure to of BSD to engage with their upstream, and the fact that Theo (of all people!) fought so hard over etiquette smells funny, esp after Marcus suggested that he knew about the GPL problem and spoke with Theo about it before Buecher ever sent that email. It doesn’t take six months to send an email asking for permission.

• #9 by anon on April 8, 2007 - 2:38 am

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  This sort of claim has to be made publicly, not privately. How is everyone that has obtained the code, in any way supposed to know that they don’t have the code under the license that they believe they do.

  It’s not a matter to be dealt with privately, everyone must know that state of the code.