Re: Wasting our Freedom

From: Kyle Moffett
Date: Sun Sep 16 2007 - 04:23:27 EST


There's no need to CC all those FSF people on this as I'm sure they're plenty busy with other things, have lots of people to dispel FUD for them, and certainly don't need the excess email in their inboxes.

On Sep 16, 2007, at 03:52:43, J.C. Roberts wrote:
On Sunday 16 September 2007, Kyle Moffett wrote:
On Sep 15, 2007, at 06:33:18, J.C. Roberts wrote:
Would Linus put up a fight if someone took his source tree and relicensed the whole thing as GPLv3 without his permission? Yep, you betcha he'd fight and he has already had to put up with a lot of strong arm nonsense from the GPLv3/FSF zealots.

OH COME FREAKING ON!!!! Can you guys DROP it already? There was NO VIOLATION because nobody actually changed the code!!! The patch that Jiri submitted was a *MISTAKE* and was *NEVER* *MERGED*!!!

You are wrong.

Well you seem to have CCed the linux kernel mailing list, so I am talking about the linux kernel sources, not stuff hosted on madwifi.org or other places as I have no knowledge or control over what those maintainers accept or do not accept. If you aren't talking about the Linux kernel itself then you should get your flamewar off this list as nobody here cares.


http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=118857712529898&w=2
http://madwifi.org/browser/branches/ath5k

I see these very out-of-date URLs showing people making changes to some already-problematic licenses in various files in some other non- linux-kernel repository. Please note that the Linux kernel does *NOT* contain an atheros driver right now! Therefore this doesn't seem to be the patch posted to LKML I was talking about:

Original patch:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/28/157

Responses:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/28/304
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/29/171
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/29/69

The "madwifi" site is not a linux-kernel branch at *all*. The stuff that gets imported there is totally under the control of the madwifi people and if you want to gripe about copyright *they* are the people you should be griping to. It's like complaining to the OpenBSD developers about copyright issues in some code that NetBSD developers commit to their repository; it just plain doesn't make sense.

As Jeff Garzik said:
A better place to look would be 'ath5k' branch of
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless- dev.git

but nonethless, the fact remains that ath5k is STILL NOT UPSTREAM and HAS NEVER BEEN UPSTREAM, as can be verified from

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
(official linux repo; nothing is official until it hits here)

On Sep 16, 2007, at 03:52:43, J.C. Roberts wrote:
I suggest actually taking the time to get the facts before making completely baseless statements. When you make obviously erroneous statements, it leaves everyone to believe you are either hopelessly misinformed, or a habitual liar. -Which is it?

For starters, I seem to have plenty of references to "the facts" as cited above. You even deleted 3 major references from the email you were *replying* to!

Secondly, what the HELL is with you guys and the personal attacks?!?!? You said I am "hopelessly misinformed, or a habitual liar"??? You very carefully snipped out the 3 examples I gave where people were describing how the Linux kernel did the right thing both legally and ethically so you could make those claims? Seriously, if you really want to know what went on as far as the Linux Kernel and the LKML is concerned, please go read the endless LKML archives on this particular topic and stop bringing up this topic over and over again with a few thousand people who didn't do anything wrong and don't care about that code at all.

If you want to know what the real upstream sources contain they're all publicly available for purview at:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/ linux-2.6.git;a=summary

I'm really getting tired of these endless streams of emails which show up with a new thread every few days containing 95% insults and flamage and I'm going to completely ignore anything further related to atheros/licensing/etc since virtually all of the people sending emails to the LKML can't seem to have a reasonable conversation. Plonk.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

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