Re: Dual-licensing potential?
On Wednesday 14 January 2009 02:19:05 David Ellingsworth wrote: On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Paul Harris p...@whotookspaz.org wrote: Hello there, I was wondering if it would be at all possible for the developers of b43 to consider dual licensing the drivers, so that users of other UNIX systems could benefit from them (in particular as part of the kernel). Obviously, as they're not BSD-licensed, they can't be integrated into any BSD kernel, which is a real shame, since this makes wireless connectivity on a lot of machines impossible. At best, I'd like to ask for the code to be released under both licenses, but if this isn't a possibility I'd hope it would at least be possible for special permission to be given allowing the drivers to be BSD-licensed for integration into the FreeBSD kernel only (the blue pill.) Thanks for your consideration. More than likely, this is not going to happen. Broadcom has made it extremely difficult to develop these drivers and last I heard the developers weren't too adamant about providing a path whereby Broadcom could take advantage of their efforts without contributing back to the community. If you search archives, you'll see there's plenty of tension around licensing the code under a BSD style license. *cough* bcm *cough* Please don't spread clearly incorrect statements like these. I am willing to relicense parts of the driver on a per-case base. I said that more than once. Please contact me and the other copyright holders _BEFORE_ you take the code. So you show me the lines you want, and we decide whether you get permission or not. Everything I said in this thread: http://marc.info/?l=linux-wirelessm=117571766928130w=2 still applies. Besides that, you might want to contact the DragonFly people, which are developing a BSD licensed BCM driver from scratch. -- Greetings, Michael. ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: Dual-licensing potential?
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Paul Harris p...@whotookspaz.org wrote: Hello there, I was wondering if it would be at all possible for the developers of b43 to consider dual licensing the drivers, so that users of other UNIX systems could benefit from them (in particular as part of the kernel). Obviously, as they're not BSD-licensed, they can't be integrated into any BSD kernel, which is a real shame, since this makes wireless connectivity on a lot of machines impossible. At best, I'd like to ask for the code to be released under both licenses, but if this isn't a possibility I'd hope it would at least be possible for special permission to be given allowing the drivers to be BSD-licensed for integration into the FreeBSD kernel only (the blue pill.) Thanks for your consideration. More than likely, this is not going to happen. Broadcom has made it extremely difficult to develop these drivers and last I heard the developers weren't too adamant about providing a path whereby Broadcom could take advantage of their efforts without contributing back to the community. If you search archives, you'll see there's plenty of tension around licensing the code under a BSD style license. *cough* bcm *cough* Regards, David Ellingsworth ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: Dual-licensing potential?
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 23:09 +, Paul Harris wrote: Hello there, I was wondering if it would be at all possible for the developers of b43 to consider dual licensing the drivers, so that users of other UNIX systems could benefit from them (in particular as part of the kernel). Obviously, as they're not BSD-licensed, they can't be integrated into any BSD kernel, which is a real shame, since this makes wireless connectivity on a lot of machines impossible. At best, I'd like to ask for the code to be released under both licenses, but if this isn't a possibility I'd hope it would at least be possible for special permission to be given allowing the drivers to be BSD-licensed for integration into the FreeBSD kernel only (the blue pill.) I would really dislike seeing that happen. A BSD license would allow others to take the great (but incomplete) work done here, expand upon it and not give back, providing them with more (possibly closed) functionality than the original authors have. That completely invalidates the spirit of FOSS IMHO. b. ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
