The Big Questions

New? (Where were you during the dot-com boom?)

> E.g. in this particular case both Bruce and Rob Landley have explicitly
> stated that they have revenue-generating relations with various
> organisations that are adversely affected by this law suit.

Actually, I made more off the SFLC's various lawsuits than I did off of Cisco. (Despite never asking the SFLC for a dime.) The SFLC guys actually raised the money angle when I was breaking up with them, ala:

> meaning that Rob will not
> be named a plaintiff in any of the lawsuits and he will not be entitled
> to any potential recovery that comes from them.

(Gee thanks, hadn't noticed those were connected. Good to have that cleared up.)

Sticking with the SFLC would probably have been in my financial best interest, but obviously that's not what I did. (Anybody who goes into open source for the money is missing the _point_.)

Also, I kept working with Cisco for months after the suit was filed. (They understood that a lawfirm I'd worked with was taking action on behalf of another client, _I_ wasn't the one suing them.) I just wasn't _accomplishing_ anything anymore from an open source perspective due to management going into some sort of panic lockdown when lawyers were invoked, and Linux in general being massively de-prioritized within the company to limit their legal exposure to who knows what future lawsuits.

The thing was, they'd already been sued over the original Linksys router by the busybox developers (Erik Andersen's father's a lawyer) back in 2002 or so. That was the legal action that had gotten them to release their Linksys source code in the first place, from which OpenWRT and friends emerged. (Yes, Linksys responded to that first lawsuit by ceasing all Linux development and doing vxworks-based routers instead, and it took them about five years to get over it. But in that case the code release was worth it, as evidenced by OpenWRT and similar projects it allowed to happen.)

In that original lawsuit, the busybox developers hadn't _asked_ for the source code to the toolchain (because they didn't _need_ it, it was bog standard mips or arm depending on variant), so Linksys hadn't tracked it down back then. Now a _second_ group came around five years later and started rehashing the same old issues they thought were settled, and Cisco's management started going "if we settle with them, who _else_ is going to come out of left field and sue us?" And thus they started "limiting the company's exposure to Linux"...

So ENTIRELY PREDICTABLY the lawsuit drives Cisco away from Linux for at least another five years (possibly longer, twice may be considered a pattern), but this time we don't get valuable code and new open source projects on the order of OpenWRT and the half-dozen other projects that spun off from it. No, we get _nothing_ other than the FSF going "I'm still relevant, I'm still relevant, look I can file a me-too lawsuit five years late that accomplishes nothing!"

> However, I have several devices (routers, laser printers, etc.) which
> contain sizeable amounts of free software, to an extent the product's
> functionality is dependent on it, yet I can not rebuild the software.
> Sure, I get the source to the Linux kernel and various generic
> utilities, but it's nearly missing the device and/or function specific
> stuff. Often there isn't even a working build system to create the
> firmware image format.

You know what I considered the single most important thing I was trying to accomplish while I was at Cisco? The thing the SFLC's actions _really_ screwed up? Hobbyist access to serial adapters for their routers:

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#05-12-2008

Cisco's engineers have a little dongle circuit that gives a serial console on an unmodified router. The one I got for the WRT610n hooks under one of the ethernet ports (the ethernet cable holds it in place), where it connects to some extra pins and translates the result into a serial port. (It's not just wiring, there an actual chip in the thing converting the TTL signals into rs232, I took one apart to see why it wasn't working and it turns out to be a nontrivial piece of equipment.)

The problem is, they only ordered a small number of them as debug adapters for in-house use during development, and at such low volume each of the suckers cost more than the router it connects to.

I convinced the CTO I spoke to that something he could do to make the open source guys happy was sell those adapters to the community cheaply through a web page. That way hobbyists could get a serial console on their routers without needing to soldier their own chips to the board, which most hobbyists aren't up for. (He suggested giving some away at OLS, which was nice, but I wanted to make sure _everybody_ could order them. It's important to ask how people are supposed to develop an interest in fiddling with these devices in the first place: barrier to entry must be low for people who have not previously expressed interest. And you must be prepared for demand for development tools to scale up.)

Unfortunately, end-user access to the debug adapters went out the window when the SFLC sued 'em and everything went "under review". (Making the open source community happy ceased being a priority overnight.) And thus if you want to reflash your router today, you have a way harder time of it than necessary thanks to the SFLC and the FSF.

The _sad_ part is the community already had working toolchains built from source that targeted all these boards, and had for years, so the SFLC's suit served no possible pragmatic purpose. Just as none of the lawsuits I was involved with ever resulted in a single line of code merged into the busybox source control repository. It was all ivory tower idealism with a _negative_ pragmatic result.

> It's not bad that people make money from free software and indeed it's a
> *requirement*, if free software is to be sustainable.

Just like it's a requirement for all those bloggers to be paid to continue blogging. And all those deviantart accounts will close if people don't make money off of their drawings. Webcomic artists must get syndication deals for the artform to remain viable. People posting video to youtube are all in it for the money. Gold farmers are the only _true_ World of Warcraft players.

That would be a "no". Being able to make a living off of your hobby is a good thing, but it's not actually required for the continued existence of the hobby.

Some of us actually enjoy programming.

> Indeed, it seems that goal has mostly been abandoned by many free
> software hackers.

I'm an open source developer, not a free software developer. (GPLv2, not v3.) Perhaps this is why I continue to do it even when I'm not paid to.

Rob