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About the calculus for the projectAbout the calculus for the projectPosted Feb 4, 2012 1:10 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: About the calculus for the project by dlang Parent article: A tempest in a toybox
you may want to actually go look at toybox and it's creator (Rob Landley, a former maintainer of Busybox, and one of the plaintifs in many of the SFLC busybox lawsuits) I have no problems with Rob's work. Since toybox was a GPLv2 project for several years, it couldn't have been created to make it easy to bypass the GPL. Of course not. It was only co-opted for that purpose. The evidence is damning: On an engineering note, they never contributed a single line of code to BusyBox. NOT ONE. I thought they would, but they didn't, so I stopped pursuing them. What does it say to you? Two things. OEMs don't really change busybox code thus it's enough to just call busybox --version, download tarball from the official site and you can recreate binary. Now, we have two pieces of software (busybox and Linux kernel). One is 100 times more complex and 1000 times more often modified in practice by OEMs. And someone want to replace the simplest half of the pair - with the explicit goal to STFU the guys who use it as a proxy to get sources for the more interesting part. What does it say about the possible goals? In fact SONY and others stretched copyright so much that you can argue that project under discussion is doing is most probably flat out illegal. Because in 99% of cases it'll be used as a means to facilitate copyright violation. This fact was enough to kill Naster, why should it be ignored in this case?
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About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 4, 2012 1:25 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you say
> I have no problems with Rob's work.
but then you say
> that project under discussion is doing is most probably flat out illegal.
but you are talking about exactly the same project, Rob's toybox project.
which is it, Rob's project is Ok, or Rob's project is illegal?
you can't have it both ways.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 4, 2012 11:21 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] you can't have it both ways. Yes, I can. > I have no problems with Rob's work. Check the first world: I. I, personally, have no problems with Rob's work - but then I'd prefer world where copyright is much less powerful (or where it does not exist at all, as I've already said). > what that project under discussion is doing is most probably flat out illegal. But Disneys and SONYs of our world prefer not just strong, but superstrong copyright. They lobby for extensions in congress, they constantly try to straighten it in lawsuits, etc. IMNSHO (as Napster story showed) they already inflated power of copyright so much that that what Tim is doing is most probably illegal because that feature would have no commercial value without the non-infringing product. but you are talking about exactly the same project, Rob's toybox project. Nope. Rob's project used GPL and as such for not usable for Napster-style copyright indictment. Because it was just practically impossible to use it without violating both license of kernel and license of toybox. What Tim did is convinced Rob to change license - and this made toybox mostly useful as a facilitator of infringement of Linux kernel copyright. Right now it's a theory - and not very solid at that. We'll need more evidence before it can be tested in court. If most toybox users will nonetheless diligently ship sources of Linux kernel (this is what Tim explains what is the goal of project: industry guys are quite Ok with GPL compliance and only want bisybox replacement to avoid pesky SFC) - then this theory will evaporate in a puff of smoke. If most users will infringe on Linux kernel copyright then aforementioned theory will be straightened enough to question the legality of initial Tim's work, too. I just want to point out that SONY, too, can not have it both ways: it can not push to expand copyright power endlessly and at the same time expect that it'll not be affected by said expansion on the other front where it's not plaintiff, but defendant. Right now the coin is in air and how it'll land depends on future actions of chip vendors and suppliers. As well as on the future actions of Tim itself: he can claim that toybox is just first step and chip vendors and suppliers plan to replace Linux kernel, too (this will close this problem once and for all), but then he should show come concrete steps in this direction to convince court that it's all is not just "smoke and mirrors". BSD-relicensed (that's important) toybox looks very much like Napster-style copyright infringement facilitator.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 4, 2012 19:04 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
I'm going to eradicate the context: you are basically advancing a theory which states that relicensing one software from GPL to BSD is illegal because some completely unrelated GPL-licensed software's license can then be violated without legal consequences?
I think such a theory would be laughed out of any court. If licenses are being violated on some piece of software, then let those who have the authority sue if they choose to. If the kernel people do not feel like suing, then it does seem questionable to me that busybox people feel like they have the right to impose settlement conditions on the kernel because of violations on busybox.
Secondly, GPL does not have so much leverage as it once seemed to: there appears to be not-GPL replacements for most if not all the pieces of the system software stack today. I'm sure that changing from Linux to some other kernel would be a tough engineering effort, but scaring enough companies with GPL threats could make them band together and start a replacement effort on some other kernel (bsd?). In the end, if all GPL-licensed software becomes replaced then the legal theory you are advancing will fail too, because there is no GPL-licensed software left whose license could be violated.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 4, 2012 21:22 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I'm going to eradicate the context: Which will make the further discussion pointless. Eben Moglen said it best here: It generally turns out, as I know from having spent almost a quarter of a century now as a lawyer for hackers, that when hackers pretend to be lawyers, there are certain predictable formulations that they come to; they assume a degree of consistence in legal rules that is not achievable; this is a primary problem which occurs particularly in US focused conversation, such is that in Debian Legal, where the libertarian demand for intellectual consistency, and the hacker belief that laws are form of code that are executed without errors or ambiguities, joins together to create a particular frame of analysis for legal questions. Context is everything when law is concerned. The very same actions can be interpreted radially differently in court - depending on the context. That's why you can not just grab random pieces of legal advice and use them in court and that's why legal advice is so costly in general: it must be fine-tuned for your particular case. If licenses are being violated on some piece of software, then let those who have the authority sue if they choose to. Oh, sure. Only copyright holders of the code in kernel can ever sue Tim. I and you can not (unless you own significant chunk of kernel code, that is). At least that's the situation today. It may change tomorrow. If the kernel people do not feel like suing, then it does seem questionable to me that busybox people feel like they have the right to impose settlement conditions on the kernel because of violations on busybox. Sure. But when they will finally decide to sue they may decide to sue not just people who violated their copyright, but the people who've facilitated infringement of said copyright. And if it will be found that toybox is mostly used by sleazy companies to continue to violate kernel's copyright... well, at this point the project in question can found itself in hot water. Note: it all will depend on how far companies will stretch copyright in their efforts to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts knowing, or with respect to civil remedies, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any copyright or related rights. Looks like Disneys and SONYs of the world are quite serious which means that while what Tim is doing today is still legal (even if morally questionable) it may become illegal tomorrow! Secondly, GPL does not have so much leverage as it once seemed to: there appears to be not-GPL replacements for most if not all the pieces of the system software stack today. Indeed. As I've said already if toybox will be mostly used in combination with some kind of BSD kernel then the aforementioned theory will evaporate in a puff of smoke. We'll see. In the end, if all GPL-licensed software becomes replaced then the legal theory you are advancing will fail too, because there is no GPL-licensed software left whose license could be violated. Sure. If the project in question will be expanded to cover all the GPL-licensed code typically used by shady contractors and if GPL code will be eradicated as result then it'll be different story entirely. But so far it does not look like port of toybox to other kernels is even considered - and this puts the whole effort squarely in the "copyright facilitator" bin.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 5, 2012 11:12 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
An interesting argument I hadn't considered. In the interest of adding to your supposition I'll add the following. The theory of copyright infringement facilitation without engaging in actual infringement yourself has been used successfully in court several times in the US.
As you mention the first use was the Napster case that resulted in the entire company getting shut down. But there have been other cases, such as Limewire, Grokster and several other smaller players. In all the previous cases it was a civil lawsuit and involved the argument that centered around contributory copyright infringement and resulted in millions of dollars of damages. Most of the cases were appealed all the way to the Supreme and as such have established a fairly solid legal citation in future cases (baring a future reversal by the Supreme).
But more recently the MegaUpload cases presents a dramatic escalation in this with a criminal proceeding with racketeering charges tied in where the US government is seeking multiple years of jail time for the parties responsible. The theory you've presented is interesting because it's a well established precedent in US courts that contributory copyright infringement is a real and punishable offense.
The court verdicts to date have basically established the precedent that if the intent and use of the product was for the primary purpose of infringing copyright, even if there are legitimate uses that make up a small part of the use case, that the parties responsible are guilty of contributory copyright infringement for the behavior of their users. You have to wonder if these verdicts couldn't be stretched to extend to this situation. Although it'll be argued the intent wasn't to encourage GPL infringement (but to avoid a SFC legal action) by the people involved it should be fairly obvious that regardless, a significant number of people in the community and on LWN have interpreted the action to be an attempt to facilitate infringement and that this entire discussion would likely be used in the case, particularly the comments by those involved.
Would a GPL case extend to this level? I doubt it, but as you say history doesn't predict the future. With laws like SOPA in play an ambitious district attorney looking to get their name in the news could litigate a GPL case without the consent of copyright holder (one of the many scary clauses in the law).
An interesting hypothesis no doubt, thanks for posting it.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 5, 2012 15:00 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Now you can understand why I clearly distinguish Rob's work and Tim's work. Rob just wrote yet another replacement for busybox - may be technically interesting, but legally pretty plain project. It used the same GPL which both busybox and Linux kernel are using thus it was not all that interesting from the legal perspective: yes, SFC had no way to enforce it's copyright, but thus was just Rob's goodwill, it was easy for him to change his mind at any time. Hardly a reason for a hypothetical sleazy company to be excited. And hardly anybody was excited: toybox was around for years but was mostly a curiosity not worth talking about much. Tim, on the other hand, convinced Rob to change license and make it as close to public domain grant as possible. Now it becomes much easier to infringe on kernel's copyright. Tim even admits it's directly:
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 0:18 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
No, Tim asked me if I knew anybody who'd want to work on extending Android's crappy Toolbox so people wouldn't need to replace it with software that can never ship as part of Android, due to Google's existing "no GPL in userspace" policy which most android vendors inherit:
http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html
_I_ am the one who brought up Toybox, and pointed out I already _had_ something that was way the heck ahead of Toolbox, and which I'd love an excuse to work on again.
And I have already been talking about the smartphone replacing the PC since BEFORE ANDROID EVEN EXISTED:
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#09-10-2010
(The 2002 reference in that is about when I wrote an article on the topic for a now-defuct wesite called linux and main, I might be able to pull the article out of archive.org if I try. I note that Eric's objection was ergonomics would limit the usability of palm pilot and newton and such. There weren't any USB docking stations yet, but it seemed obvious to me that the problem would be solved, and that internet-through-cellphone was _compelling_. Yes, in 2002. And yes, I hit bad bufferbloat the first time I tried getting internet through my cell phone on Linux in 2001, I just had no idea what to _do_ about it and assumed I'd configured things wrong.)
I'm the one who made the connection that "Oh, if toybox was BSD licensed _that_ would give it a separate niche from busybox giving me an excuse to work on it without feeling like I was wasting my time, because android is a deployment platform that only bsd licensed code can fit in. And I could use that as leverage to steer android towards a more full-fledged posix environment, and from there it's a simple step towards leveraging my aboriginal linux project to make android self-hosting, and then android would have a leg up against the iPhone, which it's been losing to recently".
The enthusiasm was _mine_, because I saw a path forward I'd missed before, which Tim's agenda was just a tiny part of. Tim was actually going a different direction with it, by I got an idea talking with him.
It was an idea that FSF zealots really don't like, but they lost me in 2006:
http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#03-12-2006
And I've been drifting _away_ from the GPL ever since. Before you blame Tim for my "screw it, BSD license the sucker" decision, read this bit almost TWO YEARS EARLIER:
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#10-01-2010
> Since uClibc's so obviously moribund, I'm vaguely pondering poking at
And goes on to talk about the merits and drawbacks of BSD licensing.
This was me analyzing some more of Android's licensing decisions a year before I relicensed Toybox:
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#09-10-2010
So by all means, consider me some kind of strange puppet for Tim that's unable to form any independent thoughts about licensing, let alone make informed decisions like an adult.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 10:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If this is all about Android then why the page was started with talks about GPL infringement facilitation? It still talks about this aspect first and about potential usage in Android second.Better userspace for Android will be easy sell. GPL infringement facilitator is not. Even if technically it's the same project. P.S. Actually userspace for android is slightly different project because to support Dalvik you need different set of tools then to support traditional POSIX userspace.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:19 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
"We'd like to get as many patents as possible to protect ourselves from the insane patent system via mutually assured destruction and cross-licensing agreements."
"We'd like to get an alternative to BusyBox to protect ourselves from the insane out of control SFLC/SFC and their demands about third-party binary only kernel modules and vendor toolchains we've never even seen the source code to if we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox but didn't SAY we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox."
"We'd like to distance ourselves from this legal quagmire rather than try to navigate an endless shifting maze."
That's not _my_ motivation, but I can certainly see spraying for lawyers holding an appeal for people, especially when legal stuff isn't what they _do_. And if it makes 'em more likely to use the code I already _wrote_ and am still adding to (which is technically better than the alternative)? Sure, why not?
Rob
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:22 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
By the way, another analogy for all the insane GPL zealots to ponder:
Don't put lifeboats on your cruise ship. Make it unsinkable. By planning for what happens if the boat sinks, you're planning to sink the boat! Shame on you, lifeboats are EVIL!
Rob
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:21 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] You are not putting lifebots on a ship. You are adding couple of lifebots to Titanic. This makes no sense whatsoever. If you don't expect for it to be sunk then why bother with lifebots at all? If you do expect crash and burn scenario then why do you plan to save just a handful of people, not all of them?
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 11, 2012 14:35 UTC (Sat) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ...
She had FAR more lifeboats than were legally required.
And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...)
(I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds.)
Cheers,
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 11, 2012 15:39 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ... Sure. Law required just 16 lifeboats while Titanic had 20. With total capacity of 1,178 people on a ship with capacity of 3,547. Less then ⅓ space per person. Good idea. Not. And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...) That's another issue. Yes, even if you have enough lifeboats you still can lose a lot of lives in a case of crush. But if you don't have enough lifeboats to save all passengers then loss of life is inevitable. I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds. Sure. More then one space per person may be good idea. How much more is subject of the debate. Less then one space per person is pointless - and this is exactly how Titanic was equipped.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 12, 2012 15:51 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
btw, you might stand more chance of convincing people rather than repelling them if you didn't routinely call them insane. Just a thought.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 13, 2012 8:27 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
This is true. But I don't think Rob is calling all GPL zealots insane...? That's just a tiny subset.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 5, 2012 12:25 UTC (Sun) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Thank you for a thoughtful reply. I personally do hope that people would not find this argument reasonable way to think about licenses, because in general case any piece of software that happens to eliminate another piece of GPL software could be argued to help facilitate GPL infringement on the remaining software.
But as you point out, law is essentially insane and random, and stranger things could happen. My personal feeling, however, is that this is not fair nor right, whatever the courts might find.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 5, 2012 15:14 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I personally do hope that people would not find this argument reasonable way to think about licenses, because in general case any piece of software that happens to eliminate another piece of GPL software could be argued to help facilitate GPL infringement on the remaining software. Nope. Again: context matters. As rahvin already wrote: The court verdicts to date have basically established the precedent that if the intent and use of the product was for the primary purpose of infringing copyright, even if there are legitimate uses that make up a small part of the use case, that the parties responsible are guilty of contributory copyright infringement for the behavior of their users. Not only you should show that someone picked your piece of software because it's under BSD license (that's understandable: less rules to follow), you must show another piece of GPLed code which is commonly used with first one and show that most users of your software not only continue to use it, but also do it in violation of it's copyright. Tall order, indeed. But as you point out, law is essentially insane and random, and stranger things could happen. My personal feeling, however, is that this is not fair nor right, whatever the courts might find. No questions here. I also feel that copyright's power is inflated way, way, WAY beyond any reasonable limits. But... dura lex sed lex. And since Disneys and SONYs of the world were instrumental in said insane inflation it's only proper to apply no mercy, as much punishment as possible principle to them.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 5, 2012 23:13 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Not only you should show that someone picked your piece of software because it's under BSD license (that's understandable: less rules to follow), … What about the idea of someone picking the BSD-licensed software simply because it was better code than the GPL software (i.e., written by somebody with several years of experience with the GPL codebase, taking into account any design and implementation issues since discovered with the GPL codebase etc., and better targeted towards solving the actual problem that users of the software need solved)? In that case it would be difficult to argue that the »intent and use« of a BSD-licensed Busybox workalike would be »for the primary purpose of infringing copyright«. Maybe its intent and use is to provide a technically superior all-in-one shell-type tool, and its users prefer it to Busybox on these grounds (with the more liberal license as a fringe benefit). This isn't Napster, after all. Given this, it would be next to impossible (for someone like the SFC) to show that somebody picked the BSD-licensed software exclusively on licensing grounds, and claiming that this in turn was only done to avoid GPL compliance issues concerning the Linux kernel would border on a conspiracy theory. At the very least, someone like the SFC would have to prove that the workalike was clearly less suited, technically, for its intended use (by the defendant, not the FLOSS community in general) than the original GPLed Busybox, and that the defendant still went for the workalike just to be able to do an end-run round the SFC. Have fun.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 6, 2012 0:33 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I never said it's easy to probe illegality of this work. In fact just a dozen years this question was flat out crazy: it was obvious that if there no copyright violation then there are no material for lawsuit. And as I've already said: it's hard to say a-priori which way the development will go. In fact there already exist alternative BSD-licensed userspace fro Linux: Android's one (albeit in this case it's pretty clear that it's goal was to support Java-based environment and not to act as GPL-free replacement for GNU tools). And if companies that use toybox will be postly good citizens then we'll not a problem: as was shown many times already it's not about busybox or toybox. But Disneys and SONYs of the world are hard at work - and they continue to extend the reach of copyright in the vain hope to squeeze more money from 100 years old creations. If enough guys from enough companies will blab out that they are switching to toybox to solve "SFC problem" then you'll have materials for lawsuit. It'll not matter if toybox is inferior or superior. If proportion of GPL-violating companies will be high enough among toybox users and low enough among busybox users and you'll have direct evidence for a few "switchers" - you'll probably have enough for the court in the current world, where copyright importance is inflated beyond any reason. And in tomorrow's world it may be even easier.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 9, 2012 23:44 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
I'm the ex-maintainer of busybox, who started toybox before I actually did the last release of busybox. I'm the one who _started_ the busybox license enforcement lawsuits (and recruited Erik Andersen in into it, and yes I still have my old email).
You're claiming that my new project might be considered an infringement facilitator AGAINST MY OLD PROJECT, and that stopping the lawsuits I _started_ might somehow legally do... something?
Your honestly believe that the legal system can and should forbid people from doing new things that compete with (and obsolete) their own previous work? And you take this position in defense of "freedom", as defined by the FSF?
I ask seriously: are you crazy? Do you need some kind of diagnosis and treatment? (I already _know_ the FSF does...)
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 10:06 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] You're claiming that my new project might be considered an infringement facilitator AGAINST MY OLD PROJECT, and that stopping the lawsuits I _started_ might somehow legally do... something? Oh yea. Absolutely. This is what this lawsuit is all about. Oracle even explicitly claimed that the fact that the very same people are working on Dalvik that worked on Java decades ago increases Google's liability. Or perhaps you live in some other world where such things never happen? Your honestly believe that the legal system can and should forbid people from doing new things that compete with (and obsolete) their own previous work? That's different question. I know that the legal system can and does forbid people from doing new things that compete with their own previous work. I'm not saying it's good thing - that's another thing entirely. And you take this position in defense of "freedom", as defined by the FSF? Law exist without FSF's freedom. Government changes it, not FSF. I've pointed that what you are doing is probably illegal and that you can be sued for doing it in the future. This is almost certainly true. But I'm not saying that this is what FSF should do. Just because you can sue someone does not mean you should. That's different story altogether. I ask seriously: are you crazy? Do you need some kind of diagnosis and treatment? Me? I'm absolutely sane. The copyright world is crazy - but sadly I don't know how to cure it.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:15 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
> That's different question. I know that the legal system can and does
> forbid people from doing new things that compete with their own previous > work.
Not in California or Texas it doesn't. ("Right to work" states.) There's rather a lot of case law on this. Silicon Valley was _built_ on the "traitorous eight" from Shockley Semiconductor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
Honestly, if you work in the industry you get to know this stuff...
Rob
(Oratroll is suing over patents, sounds like they're attempting to establish treble damages for wilful violation, ala http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/advanced-patent/patent-i... . Which is in fact the reason Linus gives for not reading software patents.)
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:38 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight Sure. These tales are very well-known. But that happened half-century ago. Companies worked diligently to rectify "the problem" all that time. Today the outcome of such lawsuit is quite different to predict. Oratroll is suing over patents Nope. Copyrights are very much in dispute, too. And outcome is not yet certain. And I'm sure if Oracle will be repelled this time then it'll cooperate with Disneys and SONYs of the world to change the law to make sure next time they'll win. In fact the whole SFC "problem" have one trivial and quite logical solution: change the law, reduce copyright power and make what SFC is doing illegal. Sadly Disneys and SONYs of the world reject this solution out of hand because it'll reduce their copyright power, too. Well, as long as that's the case don't expect me to feel any sympathy to their plight. They brought it on themselves.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 9, 2012 23:36 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
> BSD-relicensed (that's important) toybox looks very much like
> Napster-style copyright infringement facilitator.
"It's not impossible, I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters."
I wrote the toybox code, I own the copyright on the code, I issued a second license to my copyrighted code. (A license is a permission statement. The older versions were released under GPLv2 and that was the only set of conditions you had permission to use it under. I have since granted additional permission to use my copyrighted code under less restrictive terms. Legally, the two are unrelated.)
As the guy who _started_ the Busybox licence enforcement suits, as someone who spent a couple years paid by IBM's lawyers as a domain expert to help defend them against legal claims, as someone who had an email exchange with Richard Stallmand in the 90's about nuances of the GPL for a "copyright and licensing HOWTO" that eventually turned into a week-long series of articles on the five types of intellectual property for The Motley Fool:
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
As somebody who has studied intellectual property law as a hobby since the 1990's, as someone who has spoken on panels discussing the GPL when the other panelists were professional practicing lawyers, as someone who was once flown to new York to speak on a panel with Eben Moglen (the lawyer co-author of the GPL) about GPL enforcement.
As all that and more, I tell you:
No, it's not "important". You have absolutely no _clue_ what you're talking about, and I don't appreciate the transparent FUD.
About the calculus for the project Posted Feb 9, 2012 23:17 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
> What does it say to you? Two things.
> 1. That future lawsuits will probably not bring new enhancements for > busybox.
No, it says that past ones didn't. I cut my ties at the end of 2008, I haven't seen anything new show up in the busybox repository or on the mailing list that's attributable to lawsuits since, but to be honest I haven't been paying _that_ close attention. Outside of submitting my patch implementation, fixing busybox vi's horrible serial handling, trying to convince Denys to adopt some of toybox's better infrastructure (such as having all information about a command be in one file per command), and some trivial cleanups to demonstrate the the code doesn't HAVE to be #ifdef salad (I.E. "this is what I added the ENABLE_BLAH and USE_BLAH() macros for 5 years ago, you're using them wrong")... I haven't really paid that close attention to the busybox list. I catch up when I move to a new release, get involved in a thread or two, and then wander away again.
I still seem to have an impact when I do show up. My last exchange was:
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-November/...
Which led to me fairly randomly advocating "some things are better as as shell scripts, not in C":
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-November/...
And then I wandered away again, but this morning I noticed, in year 13 of the project we now have:
http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=d0222503ff9ff26...
(My rsync script which syncs my laptop up to my web server also does a git pull on various repositories, and busybox is still in there...)
Sheer coincidence, of course. But given a choice, I'd rather put my energy into Toybox than Busybox. When I worked on busybox, I wanted it to spread up into the desktop and become the standard command line of things like Knoppix while remaining small and simple. Neither happened. Now I want toybox to spread down into android and ride the smartphone up as it displaces the PC the way the PC displaced the minicomputer, and that displaced the mainframe before it.
And before you say "that's impossible", google "Toshiba Dynadock" and imagine what plugging a USB docking station into an android phone containing a native compiler actually _means_...
Rob
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