SFC expands license compliance efforts [LWN.net]

SFC expands license compliance efforts

Posted Jun 3, 2012 10:01 UTC (Sun) by armijn (subscriber, #3653)
In reply to: SFC expands license compliance efforts by rahvin
Parent article: SFC expands license compliance efforts

A few things. First, please stop the Sony FUD as it is simply not true. It has been stated multiple times by both Tim Bird and Rob Landley that Toybox (which is, like BusyBox, a reimplementation of standard Unix and Linux tools) did not come from Sony. Ask Rob, ask Tim, they are both very approachable about this.

Second, Samba has been enforced in the past (as the SFC announcement says), they are just offloading the work onto SFC, so this is not exactly new. Sure, I expect that there will be more enforcement work being done for Samba (and it is badly needed).

Third, Wine is not used as much as you think. I have seen it only a few times in the last 7 years in some management software for wireless devices. Calling them a "key player" in a commercial Linux ecosystem is a bit far fetched. It would be very interesting to see enforcement being done for Wine though.

Fourth, the Linux kernel has already been enforced many times (in Europe). So it is not that it 'is now available'. That would be denying 8 years of enforcement work being done by gpl-violations.org and other copyright holders in the kernel.

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You are mixing issues

Posted Jun 7, 2012 19:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

First, please stop the Sony FUD as it is simply not true. It has been stated multiple times by both Tim Bird and Rob Landley that Toybox (which is, like BusyBox, a reimplementation of standard Unix and Linux tools) did not come from Sony.

You are mixing issues. It's similar to FSF vs OSI difference. While they support many projects they are not identical and the goals are different.

Tim Bird's Busybox replacement project is now pointless. In fact situation for the potential infringers is even worse then it was before.

Rob Landley's Toybox which was explicitly revived with the goal "to become the default command line implementation of Android systems everywhere" is alive and well.

Fourth, the Linux kernel has already been enforced many times (in Europe). So it is not that it 'is now available'. That would be denying 8 years of enforcement work being done by gpl-violations.org and other copyright holders in the kernel.

Again, you are mixing issues. This is not about enforcement in general. This is about enforcement efforts of SFC. Tim Bird quite explicitly said that he started the projects with the goal to make SFC toothless (the very first message says that) - and this plot failed. Now SFC will just enforce Linux kernel copyright directly without using busybox as a crutch. I'm pretty sure this will stop expected massive rush of busybox/toybox switchers: it makes no sense anymore. In this sense SONY's cynical plot failed. But of course replacement may be better in other senses besides the ability to circumvent SFC's encforcers. This means it'll be used by some new projects.