Re: OpenBSD bcw: Possible GPL license violation issues

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

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On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 15:33 -0600, Theo de Raadt wrote:

> Those were just 'EXAMPLES'?  So you had no evidence?  Why would you
> show examples of white space and variable naming when you had real
> evidence?  Or did you think that the examples would be evidence?

Of course you're putting things out of context and order again, which
we've all seen enough in this thread; but let me set this straight:

When we discovered that the driver looked similar, we first looked for
instances of code that were apparently copied (as Marcus claims "a lot
of lines in bcw are written in a way with a too close eye to your
code.") At that point we still assumed they actually were just rewritten
versions of the same functions.

However, discovering, for example, an implementation (!) of an abstract
state machine (yes, don't explain to me again how you cannot copyright a
state machine) that is exactly identical to the implementation in
bcm43xx when the description in the specs basically looks like an
octagon, we decided to look further, and discovered things like:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/ic/Attic/bcw.c.diff?r1=1.77&r2=1.78

where original code that Jon Simola wrote from the specs (!) is ripped
out and replaced by something that comes straight from bcm43xx.

And at that point, still wondering if it was just written similarly,
Stefano started comparing it on a much lower level and discovered that
there's just no way that the seemingly similar code could have been
rewritten and not copied since that would imply that there's at least
some difference except for a quick s/bcm43xx/bcw/g and re-editing of
some strings.

So that's how we got to whitespace. For the record.

johannes

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