From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757996AbXIBSbh (ORCPT ); Sun, 2 Sep 2007 14:31:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751457AbXIBSba (ORCPT ); Sun, 2 Sep 2007 14:31:30 -0400 Received: from wa-out-1112.google.com ([209.85.146.182]:65037 "EHLO wa-out-1112.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751324AbXIBSb3 (ORCPT ); Sun, 2 Sep 2007 14:31:29 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=RZ5f/IYZnF/m5YAYp0NE8sCE6oWZxoWY7Dec8B5jsrns7z/3C2wwHyQftaWqi3cPLnJDZnfEwynyZLzbM9lz+vG9tw1bbFxWmVPH274Sq9U11JyMWHrdzl5wLJhbdvgRr9R9XVJLTHqfyQu9xg+fR2lUNGnCdzv+tn+4lIzT2e8= Message-ID: <7579f7fb0709021131g43768bcet5a0895b5e56540ef@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 11:31:28 -0700 From: "Matthew Jacob" To: "Jonathan A. George" Subject: Re: "GPL weasels and the atheros stink" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <46DAF70E.9060800@austin.rr.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <46DAF70E.9060800@austin.rr.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > 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.