Open Source coders caught stealing Open Source code
DEVELOPERS OF OpenBSD took code from their brethren at Linux, violating the code's licence, the GPL. To the horror of the Linux folk, the OpenBSD licence allows proprietary use.
The Linux coders went to great pains to reverse engineer Broadcom's wireless chipset. The company's hardware is found in many wireless devices, but Broadcom shuns open source.
To avoid all legal difficulties, the Linux developers split themselves in two strictly independent teams. One group studied Broadcom's Windows driver and compiled a nearly perfect technical specification. This was used by the second team to develop a GPL'ed Linux driver, the bcm43xx.
Far less scrupulous, the OpenBSD developers seem to have simply copied bits of that GPL code into their own driver, bcw, published under the BSD licence.
Michael Buesch, lead developer for the Linux driver, stumbled across the copied code in the bcw earlier this week. Yesterday he sent a stern email to the developers at OpenBSD, copying in the bcm43xx developers mailing list here.
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