SFC expands license compliance efforts

That's an impressive number of ways to be wrong in a single sentence.

1) Sony's never been behind toybox, they just considered using it. A few of the more clueless armchair lawyers in the FSF's orbit couldn't quite fit the idea in their head that the guy who _started_ all these license enforcement actions now thinks they're a bad idea, so they picked a random corporation to scapegoat.

2) I'm still working on toybox (8 commits to the repository this week). I should cut another release for checkpoint purposes.

3) Binary-only modules; still legal according to Linus. A Legal action could easily _confirm_ that, given that Alsup just ruled that API/ABIs aren't copyrightable in the Oracle case.

4) People speculate about my financial motives for doing toybox (I'd love it if I _was_ paid to work on it, but I'm not and never was) but nobody goes "Bradley's day job is at the conservancy, and this is drumming up business for his employer"...

5) Android's still got a "no GPL in userspace" policy, so Samba changes nothing. I really hope the kernel stuff doesn't drive Google to do a BSD kernel version (which the iPhone and iPad already showed is quite viable here) the way they rewrote the whole of userspace.

> This is exactly what numerous people said was going to happen after the
> publicity of the BSD Busybox effort, in that developers from key other
> projects have stepped forward and giving SFC enforcement rights.

Because "free software" becoming synonymous with "threat of lawsuit" is really going to improve matters. (Nothing says "hobbyist" like "enforced compliance".)

> So not only is the Kernel in the game but we have Samba, Wine and several
> others that are key players and used extensively in the commercial Linux
> ecosystem.

Covered that. No GPL in userspace isn't new.

Linux on the desktop remains somewhere around 1% market share after 30 years of development, even Vista didn't give us a boost. (On the server we displaced AIX, Sun Microsystems, and the DEC Alpha. Woo.) Linux is mainstream interesting because of Android, because smartphones are displacing the PC the way it replaced the minicomputer and mainframe before it and a fork of Linux is #2 there. Note that Linux itself isn't, the _fork_ is. From the same people that rewrote Java from scratch, and whose defense from the Oracle lawsuit is "we're not using your version". And whose main competitor (which makes 3/4 of the profits from this space, ala http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57427811-37/apple-samsu... ) is using a BSD kernel to do so.

And you want to sue them? Really? This is your idea of a smart strategic move?

> You have to wonder how the people that were complaining about SFC's
> efforts feel now, given that the Kernel is now available for enforcement
> as well and there are likely to be far more devices in trouble with the
> Kernel's GPL requirements than there were with BusyBox.

Sad, and _really_ hoping this doesn't drive Android to rebase on a BSD kernel.

Rob