Busybox lawsuits: installation scripts and instructions

Posted Nov 9, 2010 4:01 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

The worry might be if it's almost impossibly hard to install.

Yes, that's a well known weakness of GPL. It's possible in a number of ways to meet all its conditions and avail oneself of gratis code without actually giving anything back. GPL 3 attempts to severely reduce the ways to do that.

But the lawsuit won't be concerned with the license that the authors of Busybox intended to or would have liked to give. All that matters is the license they did give. If that license is effective even when the code is impossible to install, so be it.