Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: GPL and Use of Ethereal (Was: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Windows Unicode build)

[ronnie sahlberg <ronniesahlberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Being consistent would also be to remember that for several years ago
there were one very large company, that were probing the possibilities
of a, in comparasion, much more trivial issue  namely
whether it would be acceptable to distribute proprietary external
plugins for ethereal.

we did not really like that idea and had issues with that.


that resulted later in that company releasing substantial amounts of
code to support a significant  transport technology as gpl to ethereal
in order to both
follow gpl and the intentions of the people that wrote ethereal.

all hats off to that vendor.   




other vendors,   as far as i have seen there has never been even any
attempts to feed patches back to ethereal or contribute back.
the only thing is a ridiculous and laughable faq that is too bizzarre
to even be funny.


I wonder how that initial nice vendor feels now when we didnt allow
them to distribute plugins for ethereal  but when we dont take proper
actions to those that build ethereal into their products.  we did not
allow proprietary plugins but we dont take actions against full
incorporation of the code itself in non-gpl products? is that
consistent?



since that other nice vendor now owns copyright to quite substantial code 
of ethereal due to their contributions?   maybe they are insterested
in the situation?

even more worrying is if someone would do this and at the same time
pull in code that are not even under GPL but under a much different
licence such as the licence for OpenH323 is?  thats a job for the
openh323 guys and phillips to look into.


I mean, GPL code, code that is non-GPL and copyrighted by others,  
some people doesnt have any interest in abiding any kind of licence at
all.