Re: "GPL weasels and the atheros stink"

From: Matthew Jacob
Date: Sun Sep 02 2007 - 14:31:37 EST


> Question #1: Is it _ethical_ (legality aside) to take someone else's
> actively maintained work (for example an OpenBSD driver) and make
> changes which can not be shared/used by the original developer/maintainer?
>
> Answer #1: Considering that the whole reason I personally choose the GPL
> for some projects is to prevent this sort of one way street behavior
> _away_ from the original OSS developers/contributors _my_ answer must
> be; No it is not ethical.

I beg to differ. If you want to put things out there for others to use
but want to avoid having the situation as you describe it, simply
license the work as such (which would be neither BSD nor GPL)-
requiring any changes to come back to the original maintainer.
*Snort*. I seem to recall Unix commercial distributions that made
claims that bug fixes that you made belonged to them.
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