LWN.net Logo

Busybox lawsuits: installation scripts and instructions

Busybox lawsuits: installation scripts and instructions

Posted Nov 9, 2010 4:01 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Busybox lawsuits: installation scripts and instructions by johnflux
Parent article: ELCE: The state of embedded Linux

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.


(Log in to post comments)

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds