[tulip] tulip on solaris

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Thomas Dodd wrote:

> > > > It would be a violation of the GPL to distribute a version of the Linux
> > > > tulip driver ported to Solaris.  Well, at least until Scott McNealy GPLs
> > > > Solaris (scheduled just after the evolution of porcine aviation).
...
> Or you could dual license the driver so we could port it.

What would my motivation be?
The tulip driver has between one and two man-years of effort, it didn't
produce any revenue.

> I'd like to see a driver for both x86 and Sparc (PCI Ultra's)
> under Solaris so I could use 2+ NICs in them with tulip cards.
> And using the same driver source for x86 and Sparc, Solaris
> and Linux would likely mean they work well together and
> any issues with one, would get fixed on all at the same time.

And Sun's contribution would be...?
Sun has a stunning market cap, a big revenue base, and thousands of
developers.  They still felt the need to put out a porting kit to use
the Linux network driver code, because they couldn't develop it in-house.

> I just disagree with limiting the uses. I would want my code
> used in as many systems as possible as long as I got proper
> credit for the code.

Feel free to release your code into the public domain or under a BSD
license.  After a few years you'll find that you've only made a
short-term contribution to society.  Companies with proprietary software
will take from the public domain and hide the code origin.

> I wouldn't want Sun/HP/SGI to port the code and add only the binary to
> their OS, with out my permission and without telling users where the
> code came from either.

That is what would happen.
Remove HP and SGI from the list, but Sun, QNX, Lynx, and Treck have all
used my driver code in violation of the license.


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
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