Hmmmm. This is honestly the first time I've heard anything about this
issue and must protest, somewhat, this practice of raising such issues
in public forums before making any noticeable attempt to contact any
of the people involved by more direct means. There are a number of
well-established and publicized mailing lists for contacting the
FreeBSD developers <hackers@freebsd.org>, the FreeBSD core team
<core@freebsd.org> and, indeed, the developer of this driver
<semenu@freebsd.org>. Any of them would probably have been more than
happy to try and address a problem like this without having to read
about it first on the front pages of Pravda, so to speak. Therefore,
in the interests of inter-group harmony and all such good things, I
would certainly appreciate a more direct approach to problem
resolution in the future and will make (as I always have) every effort
to resolve any problems on the Linux side of the fence by talking
directly to the individuals involved and only calling Linus on the
special red phone when absolutely necessary.
That said, let me also just say that the driver in question was
contributed by one Semen Ustimenko and was, to the best of our
knowledge at the time, his own work. If a mistake in attribution has
been made for all or portions of this driver then that is without
question something we're interested in fixing. Again, this all takes
me a bit by surprise and I'll naturally need a little time now to go
talk to the author (who's cc'd) and try and get a feel for how and why
this happened and what needs to be done to fix it.
> Similarly I was recently made aware of a driver named 'if_zn.c' for *BSD
> which is my znet.c driver converted to a BSD interface, again without
> permission or attribution and in violation of the copyright.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, a driver in FreeBSD called
`if_zn.c', at least not as it comes from us, and I can only assume
that perhaps you meant the if_zp.c driver? That particular driver
appears to have come to us by way of NetBSD (Herb Peryl's name is at
the top of it) and credits at least 5 other authors, one credit
section (clearly grabbed verbatim from the derived sources) reading:
/*======================================================================
A PCMCIA ethernet driver for the 3com 3c589 card.
Written by David Hinds, dhinds@allegro.stanford.edu
The network driver code is based on Donald Becker's 3c589 code:
Written 1994 by Donald Becker.
Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the
Director, National Security Agency. This software may be used and
distributed according to the terms of the GNU Public License,
incorporated herein by reference.
Donald Becker may be reached at becker@cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov
======================================================================*/
This credits Donald Becker pretty clearly and apparently in his own
words, so I'd have a hard time understanding how and why this
particular driver could be cause for concern if it is indeed the one
that Mr. Becker was referring to (otherwise, I have no idea who's
if_zn.c he's referring to).
Again, no one in FreeBSD is interested in depriving anyone of their
just and due credit for work either derived from or directly
contributed to FreeBSD. If there has been a demonstrable mistake made
in attribution, copyright or license information for any part of
FreeBSD, one need only contact core@freebsd.org detailing the problem
and we WILL respond to it. The issue of proper attribution is already
an emotional hot-button for a lot of folks and raising this kind of
issue publically can serve no purpose other than to further increase
the already high levels of political background radiation we all
suffer from. If the principals involved wish to correspond with me
directly until this is resolved, I'll also be happy to do so.
Thanks.
- Jordan
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