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Bruce made no legal "demands"

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 0:21 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: This is ridiculous! by paravoid
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

Bruce's demands are outrageous. He did license his code as GPLv2 *or* later.

Go back and read Bruce's messages. He made no "demands", only requests that his wishes be accorded some courtesy—at least with respect to the code that he wrote. Bruce explicitly said:

However, it's free software, and Rob has the right to do what he did. You, however, might want to think twice before you go along with this strangeness. [emphasis added]

(Over and over again, I see the fallacious argument that if you don't legally require something, you are somehow wrong to request it, feel strongly about it, or to try to persuade people of it.)


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Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 6:38 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Go back and read this message. He says "I request and require that you add a notice to the license statement for busybox that portions of the program are copyrighted by me, and may be licensed under the GNU General Public License without regard to the particular version of that license."

Sorry, that is a demand not a request, and a clueless demand at that. His existing copyright notices are there and not modified. They say "GNU General Public License", and the version would be by implication the then-current version of that licence; they do not say "or later". Even if they did, the key conjunction is "or", not "and". The current project's maintainers are free to use Bruce's version in a GPLv2 only project. People who want to use GPLv3 are free to go back to Bruce's original sources and use that.

For one of the open source movement's loudest self-appointed prophets, Bruce Perens (like Eric Raymond) is singularly uninformed, offensive and has contributed almost nothing since the movement started getting taken seriously (ie, since around 1998).

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 9:09 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

They say "GNU General Public License", and the version would be by implication the then-current version of that licence; they do not say "or later"

This is wrong. There is no such implication and the original author's statement (as available in this case) is the only correct interpretion. Even of the whole project is v2 only, keeping the copyright notice as requested by the author is something to do out of basic respect and morality.

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 10:07 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Go back and read those messages. The copyright messages are being kept, unchanged, in the files where they belong. To remove them would be a violation of the GPL (any version). What Bruce "requests and requires" is not this, but additional text inserted in the licence file, saying that while busybox is licensed under GPLv2, those bits written by Bruce may also be licensed under GPLv3. Such a notice is not required by the GPL and Bruce cannot demand it.

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 18:25 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> What Bruce "requests and requires" is not this, but additional text
> inserted in the licence file, saying that while busybox is licensed
> under GPLv2, those bits written by Bruce may also be licensed under
> GPLv3.

I started the forensic analysis to figure out what actual code Bruce was
demanding these notices on. When I found out how little he actually did
in the first place (and that essentially none of it had survived into the
modern version anyway), I got kind of annoyed. (The initial objective
actually wasn't to remove his code, but it's hard to remove his code from
the project when he hasn't _got_ any.)

I find it odd that this is considered newsworthy...

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