Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

Koos Vriezen
2004-08-27T10:14:36Z

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.

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

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

Koos