Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

Marcus Metzler
2004-08-27T11:03:10Z

>>>>> "Koos" == Koos Vriezen <koos.vriezen@xs4all.nl> writes:

Koos> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> >
>> > It's not up to him to decide. He can step down from his
>> maintainership, > but he can't force the driver to be removed.
>> Yes and no. From a legal standpoint you're right. However, we
>> should also be polite. If he's the sole author, and he asks for
>> it, I think it's reasonable to honor his wishes.

Koos> Doubtfully of course. I maintain a small OSS applicatione
Koos> and although it sucks, it wouldn't be there where it is now
Koos> w/o input from others. Some are better at writing code,
Koos> others making patches and others complaing why XYZ doesn't
Koos> work. But all do contribute. Imho it would be very unpolite
Koos> to them to just say, thanks for everything but this app is
Koos> dead and btw. I removed all references to it. Please play
Koos> be the rules, GPL is GPL period (and don't make this a weak
Koos> spot for OSS by being soft).

>> Of course if some new maintainer shows up and decides to infer
>> how the device worked by looking at the original open-source
>> code, that's also clearly fine. I don't want people to play
>> lawyer. Honoring peoples rights to the code they write is more
>> important than just the law.

Koos> I'm sure this will resolve one day (in the meantime, I've
Koos> put what I had on my hd on
Koos> http://www.xs4all.nl/~jjvrieze/pwc.html, please alert if the
Koos> md5sum are incorrect for those having this somewhere too).

Under what license were the binary modules distributed ?

Marcus

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