VIA is treading on thin ice with some folks it seems. Apparently, there is some concern that VIA is blatently violating the GPL.

Motherboard and chipset maker VIA is again taking some heat over its open source efforts that, according to one open source developer, now “instigate” violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The company’s record with open source developers is rife with criticism and concern, and has consistently fallen short of expectations and norms for open source developers, who claim VIA is more interested in the marketing buzz of its open source development than providing good code for developers.

This spring, VIA dropped more media chipset source code, but once again the licensing terms regressed from barely open source to far from it, says former Unichrome developer Luc Verhaegen. He says the license changes are reminiscent of past VIA stumbles. As for the licenses in the new code drop, VidStruc.h and Vinline.h, they regress to provide warranty disclaimers only for VIA and graphics company S3, but not open source developers working with the code, Verhaegen says. Additionally, in VIA’s video out code, viampg.h, MIT licensing terms were replaced with a proprietary disclaimer that again covers only the corporate side of development.

“This is most certainly not open source software,” Verhaegen writes. “This is proprietary nonsense.” Verhaegen has a history of conflict with the Taiwan-based company…. Source: NewsForge

[tags]software,open source,proprietary,via[/tags]