Software Freedom Law Center resolves BSD-GPL wireless code dispute

The Software Freedom Law Center, provider of pro bono legal services to protect and advance free and open-source software, announced on Sept. 27 that it has carefully reviewed the lineage of the open-source Atheros wireless driver for Linux and determined that portions of it can be distributed under the ISC license (also known as the two-clause BSD license).

What ordinarily might have been an issue barely worth noticing became a loud, public dispute in Linux and BSD circles. The conflict began when some Linux developers proposed on the Linux Kernel mailing list that some Atheros wireless device drivers -- some of which were already licensed under a dual-BSD/GPL license, while the rest were covered by a modified BSD license -- be re-licensed under a pure GPLv2 license.

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