Bruce Perens: Statement on Busybox Lawsuits

That's why I was still involved for a while after I stepped down as maintainer: because I'd set it up in the first place (and got Erik on board). The point was to clean up after the old "Hall of Shame", which as maintainer I felt it was my duty to handle, so I did. Three years later, I've moved on, and am not involved with the current round of lawsuits. (I think Denys Vlasenko probably should be, on general principles, or it's not really representing the busybox project. But that's just my opinion.)

Bruce: you were not involved with the project at that time. The hall of shame languished for years without your interest. (Similarly Denys Vlasenko hasn't been a party to any of these suits because he wasn't maintainer _yet_ when we contacted the SFLC.) You're _stunned_ that a project you hadn't interacted with for almost a full decade didn't bother to track you down.

You're also amazed that we didn't welcome you with open arms when your first posts to the busybox.net mailing list _ever_ were not about code, but about belated license trolling over an issue we'd already discussed for _months_ and come to a final conclusion on before you ever _noticed_.

Examples of the topic intermittently reared its head for a long time (there's more, and both of these are the start of long threads):

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-April/054...
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-July/0571...

The topic was explicitly raised for actual decision August 18th 2006:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-August/05...

I started looking at the status of some of the existing busybox code already marked GPLv2-only on September 8th:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-September...

And then your first post to the list ever, in the entire history of the list archive, was on September 13th, and was titled "Please tone down the GPLv3 paranoia":

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-September...

Well hail the conquering hero. (Shortly thereafter, someone taught me the word "Schlamiel" when attempting to describe your behavior.)

> My objection was to 1) the license change for the overall project

GPLv2 was a valid license to distribute it under when it started, and GPLv2 is the valid license to distribute it under today. The old versions from back when you were relevant are still available in the archive. You're objecting that new work done by volunteers isn't what you would have done, and are attempting to steer the volunteers "from the grave", without actually participating.

You're also rehashing an argument you lost in 2006.

> 2) the license change regarding any stuff of mine which is still in
> there.

Nobody ever said you couldn't grab your bits and use them elsewhere, you just had to be sure they were _just_ your bits, and not tangled up with other people's bits under different licenses. Easiest way to do that was to grab old versions before other people's code got merged in. (When other people's code gets merged in, dual licenses often get dropped.)

BusyBox developers merged GPLv2-only code into the project years before we _acknowledged_ it. Thus the project as a whole could only be distributed under the terms of GPLv2. Some upstream sources may have had additional dual licenses, and some code we incorporated may even have come from public domain sources. But that doesn't mean you can distribute the releases of the modern BusyBox project under any license terms _other_ than GPLv2.

As a courtesy, I offered (back in 2006) to replace any code that had your copyright notice with a fresh implementation, even though legally we weren't required to do this. You got all offended and changed the subject.

> It seems I still have code in the latest version, and stuff derivative
> of my previous work. My objection still stands.

I covered that in 2006. I offered to volunteer my time to remove code you objected to, if you would just identify it, but you weren't interested. I also pointed out you could maintain your own fork, and you did the "well maybe I will, mister!" flounce but never followed through.

Actually, there was no "maybe" about it. You said, and I quote, you "feel that a fork is necessary and will put in the work to make one":

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-September...

And then you didn't.

Meanwhile I did my own restart for _fun_ at http://landley.net/code/toybox and fed bits of that into busybox once I got over my visceral reaction to your SCO-like claims. (I need to push more code into busybox, but at this point it's structural and design changes which require convincing the busybox community that http://landley.net/code/toybox/code.html is a better design than having to touch five different files to add each new command.) But since it's a mature project where all new development is optional (modulo susv4 coming out), it's hard to prioritize proposing major design changes.

So I responded by writing code, you told other people what to do and then flounced off in a huff. Wake me when you do your promised fork. I should stop feeding the troll on this issue.

I think that's enough rehashing of ancient history, though. (Those laurels comfy? Seems like they started to smell a bit ten years ago.)

> My favorite part of the whole thing, though, is when you said you
> couldn't participate any longer because whenever you looked at my code
> you saw my face. IMO this qualified as divine punishment. And I don't
> even believe in the divine.

Punishment?

Um, dude, it really wasn't _about_ you. "You caused the problem" and "it's about you" are two different things, please get that through your head _one_ of these days. (If you knocked a bookcase over on somebody and they were bleeding, the focus of interest would be helping the person who was bleeding. There might be a secondary interest in making you go away or otherwise preventing you from causing more damage, but it wouldn't be _about_ you.)

I certainly wasn't intending to "punish" you, I was trying to get _away_ from you, because I got burned out on SCO and you started acting like SCO. You're confusing "this isn't fun anymore" with "that'll show Bruce!"

Shortly before your Triumphant Return To BusyBox, I spent a couple years focusing on defending the Linux community from SCO. (Lead author on http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween9.html and co-author on http://catb.org/~esr/hackerlore/sco-vs-ibm.html were some of the more public parts, but I put a lot of other work into that topic way back when.) These guys were nasty and evil and the most frustrating part was that whenever you pinned them down they claimed that wasn't what they'd been arguing about and changed the subject. They had a theory of ownership I referred to as "sco disease", under which code that had touched code they had touched had their ownership transmitted to it by osmosis, so that their code could never be detected and removed.

Your positions reminded me strongly and uncomfortably of SCO's, which took all the fun out of my _volunteer_ work for the BusyBox project. I said so explicitly at the time:

http://lwn.net/Articles/202120/

But before I left, I found somebody else with energy and drive who would take good care of the project, and handed it off to a new maintainer. I felt I had an obligation to do this for the good of the project. You apparently never felt such obligation.

This wasn't about "showing bruce", and it wasn't "taking my ball and going home". I no longer had enthusiasm for the project, so it was in the best interests of the _project_ (not necessarily best for me personally) to make sure it was in good hands before going off to do other things.

(I note that Erik Andersen advised me to take a few months off and see if I felt better first, but I didn't want to stall BusyBox development even that long.)

BusyBox is Denys's baby now, and I respect that. Are there elements of his maintainership that I disagree with? Sure, he's not me and thus not doing everything I would do exactly the way I'd do it. (The code is turning into an #ifdef forest again, for example.) But I'm not going to tell him how to do his job, and if I really wanted to clean it up I would _contribute_. I could submit patches to the existing project like any other developer, I could maintain my own fork, or I could write a new version from scratch (ala toybox).

I try to change things by _writing_code_, not by arguing about what _other_ people should be doing in a volunteer organization like you do, Bruce.

By the way, these days, I no longer think of you as SCO. I think of you as David Dawes of xfree86.org: irrelevant through your own actions.

And that's about the duration of my interest in the topic.