He's Right
From what I can tell, Theo de Raadt can be pretty abrasive. Acknowledging that, he's still right.
Theo posted a message to the openbsd-misc maillist recently wherein he excoriates the practice of folks conveniently dropping the BSD license from dual GPL/BSD-licensed code. In particular, I like this stanza from his email:
If you wish for everyone to remain friends, you should give code back.
That means (at some ethical or friendliness level) you probably do
not want to put a GPL at the top of a BSD or ISC file, because you
would be telling the people who wrote the BSD or ISC file:
"Thanks for what you wrote, but this is a one-way street, you give
us code, and we take it, we give you you nothing back. screw off."
I also appreciate this:
Many of those same people have been saying for years that BSD code can be stolen and that is why people should GPL their code. Well, the lesson they have really taught us is that they consider the GPL their best tool to take from us! GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out.
Amen Theo, you cranky old bastard.
Partially correct.
The piece of code in question was dual licensed, both GPL and BSD, which makes it fully legit to distribute derivate work under the GPL license. Of course I can understand Theo de Raadt feelings concerning the issue, but perhaps they should have put another license on the code instead. I don't see how this is worse than for example creating a derivate work of the whole OpenBSD kernel and release it in binary form only and not allowing users the source at all, which the BSD license support. If they get so upset about this, perhaps they have to reconsider their licensing scheme completely.
Replies to this comment
hmm.
> The piece of code in question was dual licensed, both GPL and BSD, which makes it fully legit to distribute derivate work under the GPL license.
As I understand it, not all of it was (it was some BSD-only code). But even if all of it was dual-license, only a court of law could decide whether your conclusion is correct. I cross my fingers here hoping that no one asserts differently: that conversation is so crushingly dull. ;-)
> If they get so upset about this, perhaps they have to reconsider their licensing scheme completely.
If you're uninterested in the social fallout, that's fair enough. I suppose the original mistake here was for the original copyright holder to agree to dual-license the code in the first place. I won't ever do that now for my own BSD code after reading that thread.
As I understand it, not all of it was (it was some BSD-only code). But even if all of it was dual-license, only a court of law could decide whether your conclusion is correct. I cross my fingers here hoping that no one asserts differently: that conversation is so crushingly dull. ;-)
> If they get so upset about this, perhaps they have to reconsider their licensing scheme completely.
If you're uninterested in the social fallout, that's fair enough. I suppose the original mistake here was for the original copyright holder to agree to dual-license the code in the first place. I won't ever do that now for my own BSD code after reading that thread.
Even as a layperson and not knowing the whole story I am shocked if the assertion is true that high-ranking Linux kernel developers advised others to just cut licenses out of code coming from other projects. That's less than lame, that's low. And definitely illegal, as he states.