Whats with the petty Open Source Pureness that has killed PWCX

Arjan van de Ven arjan at fenrus.demon.nl
Sun Aug 29 10:12:54 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 03:22, Listman wrote:
> We are all being shafted in this one. For those of you like me that have
> experienced high quality video courtesy of PWCX.....
> 
> http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/
> 
> Is their any way to talk some sense into the Kernel maintainers?

Is there any way to talk some sense into all these people who don't even
take the time to understand the issue before moaning loudly?

I mean; the guy demanded his driver to be removed from Linus' tree. We
might just put the driver back for fedora. We don't know yet.

As for the hook thing and binary modules... Personally I consider about
all the binary only kernel modules that are distributed in violation of
the GPL. I'm not saying one cannot do one which doesn't, just that I
haven't seen many that don't. Note that that is my personal opinion and
not my employers'. Nor am I a lawyer. 

Linus and the bulk of the kernel developers want the kernel to be free
of pure hooks for binary modules regardless of the outcome of the
gray-area discussion. The PWC driver author somehow doesn't agree with
that policy and no longer wants to maintain his driver and has requested
his driver to be removed. His right to ask that.... Others have been
reverse engineering this thing in the last few days and it appears it's
just a fancy interpolation scheme... quite valuable IP that is ;)

What most "uninformed" people who moan on several mailinglists seem to
ignore is that the GPL offers anyone the freedom to keep using the
driver. Linus did not say "Nobody can use this driver". He said "I
respect the wishes of the author to remove this". Just like Greg/Linus
removing the hook in their trees doesn't mean you or anyone else doesn't
have the freedom to put them back. The only snag is that the nemosoft
guy no longer distributes the binary only bits... which is the part that
isn't covered by the freedom of the GPL; anyone depending on those bits
voluntarily gave up their freedom and I find it really hard to feel
pitty for that.

The apparent PR campaign (including your email) actually does more
damage than good; all these random emails contain no new arguments other
than repeating the incorrect assertions, and as such make the people
that would matter actually care *less* not more about this issue.


 






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