About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 20:12 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

if you load the full series of comments and search for 'illegal' you will see it being introduced.

Please try to actually do that, Ok. You'll find that the first post is mine and it clearly states I have no problems with Rob's work.

Rob wrote busybox replacement to solve some problems with busybox. No problem so far. Then later Tim comes along and convinces Rob to change the license citing SFC as the reason. This is the point when the whole outrage started and at this point it stopped being about technically interesting rewrite of busybox and started being about legally questionable GPL infringement easement.

Only court may say for sure if such thing is legal or not, but the very fact that it's sold under "let's make sure SFC can not sue us for the violation of GPL while we continue to use identically-licensed other pieces of code" is not just morally wrong, it's highly questionable on legal grounds, too.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 11, 2012 22:30 UTC (Sat) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> Rob wrote busybox replacement to solve some problems with busybox. No
> problem so far. Then later Tim comes along and convinces Rob to change the
> license citing SFC as the reason.

Except that's not what happened.

Tim was trying to start a project called "BentoBox", which most likely would extend Android's Toolbox, and if not would start over from scratch. He was doing so in his capacity as CELF guy (not a Sony guy) because a number of different manufacturers had approached _him_ looking for such a thing, and he thought that pooling their resources was better than each of them writing yet another half-assed bsd-licensed not-busybox (toolbox, bsdbox, beastiebox, sbase, who knows how many private ones behind closed doors?)

Initially, I told him I wasn't interested. And then I thought about it and went "A _billion_ android devices. They've already had five years to ship busybox and didn't. Something is going to fill that market vacuum, and when it does it will be BIG."

I also thought: I really liked working on toybox, I only stopped because I didn't think anybody would ever use the result, because no matter how technically better I make it, it would have to displace an existing "good enough" solution with a ten year headstart including years of my own work. But... market vacuum. Billions of seats. They're going to use SOMETHING...

Tim still hasn't paid me a dime, and may never do so. (I'd love it if he _did_, but that's not why I restarted Toybox.)

I am the one who chose to relicense toybox. I didn't wait for Tim to decide to redirect his bentobox thing, I didn't wait for anybody to come up with any money, or a marketing campaign, or even a promise to use it instead of going off and doing something else that would compete with it.

I decided that Toybox should be restarted as a BSD-licensed project (Tim was proposing Apache license for bentobox). It was my code, I'm the only one who _could_ relicense it, and I'm certainly the only one who could make me work on it.

I am not Tim's puppet. And I'm not your puppet either. I've been programming since I was 12, releasing the results for free since almost that long (300 baud modem to BBS's: the first program I wrote and uploaded was "The Bard's Tailor", an editor for C64 bard's tale game save files), and doing so as open source since 1998. I didn't even MEET Tim until 2006.

That's the annoying assumption here, that some large company is pulling the strings, it's a conspiracy! In reality, large companies haven't had time to REACT to any of this. Tim made a proposal Sony has yet to even _evaluate_, and he works for them! Fortune 500 corporations move very, very slowly. They haven't noticed this project EXISTS yet. I may have 1.0 out before they do.

Rob

P.S. And please: Tim citing SFC at _me_? I fell out with SFLC before SFC forked off from them, I was very public about it in my blog, and have linked those old blog entries here ad nauseam. The no GPL in userspace thing is an Android policy which my _current_ employer (Polycom, I work in board bringup which has nothing to do with any of this) has adopted itself for Android products it ships (basically all new ones). I.E. the team I personally work on at my day job does board bringup in vanilla-ish Linux (A TI fork thereof, anyway; we recently got to upgrade to 2.6.37!), and then once we've made all the hardware work the prototypes get reformatted and handed off to a completely separate set of developers who install an android kernel (again from TI) and userspace, and write a Java GUI that runs in Dalvik and gets packaged into an apk file to install into Android. Those guys can't use _any_ GPL stuff in userspace. The only reason _we_ get to is that none of the userspace code we write ever _ships_. We're mostly just figuring out which wires aren't connected up right and which existing drivers don't do what we need them to so the vendor (TI) can fix 'em.