[ale] Are our Ethernet drivers in danger?

Benjamin Dixon beatle at arches.uga.edu
Wed Jul 4 14:33:31 EDT 2001


On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, Joseph A. Knapka wrote:

> (1) the extension doesn't add any significant functionality
> to the product, in which case, who cares?
> 
> (2) the extension is so amazingly useful that, weeks later,
> the same functionality appears in an Open Sourced fork of
> the same code. The Open Source fork, being open, improves
> much more rapidly in quality and functionality than the
> closed source. So again, who cares about the closed-
> source fork?
> 
> The only thing I can see that would prevent this is if
> the closed-forkers are so astonishingly brilliant that
> they come up with code whose functionality *millions and
> millions* of really smart people can't figure out how
> to reproduce, in which case, more power to 'em.
> Seems unlikely :-)
> 
> Of course, a "credit where due" clause would be nice.
> But I thought the BSD license actually does require
> copyright and authorship notices to remain intact.

Of course, isn't the problem here gonna be the closed source version being
constantly updated to the open source version under the BSD license? If
I'm company X, and I see that you have cloned my proprietary module and
improved it, why should I not take that BSD-licensed code, make a few
minor modifications to improve on it just a little, and
re-release it as my proprietary code? Certainly the race would be on for
both sides, but the corporate side would be profiting at open source
expense, no? Perhaps I am not fully aware of the pecularities of the BSD
license, but it seems to me that would be a serious flaw.

Ben

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