Mon, 03 Sep 2007
OpenBSD Licensing
So we are in a middle of another licensing flame war. To summarize: Jiří Slabý has posted a patch narrowing the Atheros Linux kernel driver license to GPL (some header files were BSD licensed, and the rest was GPL or BSD dual-licensed before). This caused a big uproar in the OpenBSD community, including Theo de Raadt's accusation of Alan Cox giving advice to break the law.
Narrowing the license (i.e. forking the development) is usually not very polite, and I hope Jiří had good reasons to do so. However, ethics aside, the original author of the Atheros HAL code has already said that he is perfectly OK with taking the code under GPL for the Linux kernel.
But what makes me think "WTF?" are not the licensing details, but the overall attitude of the OpenBSD people (Theo, especially): they appeal to ethics (and, in Theo's case, law), when their license clearly allows taking the software and making it proprietary. And with relicensing to GPL only, it is not even made proprietary, just a bit more restrictive. This is not the only case of Theo de Raadt actually demanding something other than their license says. See his OpenSSH funding request as an example. If they so much care about what people do with their software, and whether they give back their changes, why they did not write it into their license (e.g. use GPL instead)? Is it a "not invented here" syndrome?