[ On Friday, September 24, 1999 at 23:03:00 (-0400), Bill Sommerfeld wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: What happened to the lm75(?) driver? 
>
> you don't need to test.  we don't have any morals.  please go away
> now.

Oh!  It would seem as though Bill hasn't been taking enough of his happy
pills!  Or did I just touch too many nerves at once with my attempt at
sarcasm and comparisons to the FreeBSD folks?  Or maybe he's just sore
about my complaint about one of his changes in reference to a recent PR....

I suppose it might not have been obvious to people seeing this issue for
the first time (though it should have been to Bill), but I really don't
have a whole lot of loyalty to any "camps", though I do spend most of my
time working with NetBSD (if there were 48 hours in a day I'd work
equally with all of them!).  Anyway it's not that I'm offering the
driver back to FreeBSD just for spite -- it's nothing like that at all
in fact -- there's already been a standing offer to them right from the
beginning but originally I asked them to wait until it was integrated
into NetBSD because I didn't want to have to maintain two versions
during development once I'd ported it to NetBSD and had done more work
on it there (the bus* interface differences at the time were extremely
drastic).  Now if it's not likely going into NetBSD, and particularly if
FreeBSD now has a similar enough bus* API, it won't be too painful to
port it back, and possibly worthwhile since they don't have an LM7x
driver yet either.  (Writing it at first under FreeBSD-2.8 with so
primitive a kernel interface it reminded me of writing drivers under
Xenix!  I hadn't actually written a driver for *BSD before and the most
recent drivers I'd worked on were with the SysV DKI/DDI.)

Anyway I really would like to see the issue resolved in a public forum
without leaving a whole lot of hypocrisy in its wake.  A quick glance
through even just the kernel sources doesn't show much improvmement in
the state of existing copyright license proliferation since the first
time I jumped in on this bandwagon over a year ago.  Obviously Bill
doesn't speak directly for the foundation, and hopefully on the topic of
morals he doesn't speak for the majority of users either (and that's not
intended as sarcasm!).  A review of this thread would suggest that he
doesn't.

The ``funny'' part about this whole thing is that according to the
information published by TNFi even as recently as August 30th there
should be no objection whatsoever to either my copyright terms *or* the
actual expression of them that I have written!

Anyway for those who want to see what all the fuss is about:

	ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/LM7X.shar

(this is almost exactly the state it's been in for over a year -- I did
port it back to 1.3.3 not so long ago and tested it on an ASUS P2L97,
and I updated the copyrights just today so I could make it publicly
available)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>