Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 18:54 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by mjg59
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license.

That's your supposition, not a fact. Even if it is the case that people are replacing Busybox to avoid copyright holders who vigorously go after GPL violations, the solution isn't to decry the replacement of Busybox. The solution is to lobby other copyright holders to defend their copyrights more vigorously or to assign them to the Software Freedom Conservancy.

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Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 18:55 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not decrying the replacement of Busybox. I'm decrying the cynical attitude of the corporations backing it.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 19:38 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

Why do you insist that I'm not behind my own project? Did it escape you that not only am I mentioned by NAME on the wiki page you linked to, but the other wiki page it links to http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement is a page I put all the actual _content_ on?

The last time Sony gave me any money was travel expenses for speaking at CELF two years ago. I've never received a dime from ANYBODY for doing toybox.

Sony was considering sponsoring the work because they'd like to use the result and for-profit corporations only understand things they're either paying for or being paid for, but whether that would be paying _me_ for my weekends or paying another developer to contribute code to me... who knows? Unlikely to happen now, since you've made it a political hot potato. (Once again, an FSF zealot reduces the amount of code written for Linux with a license tantrum. Driving developers away since 1983!)

But I've been doing Toybox since 2006 for free, and I've been doing it as BSD-licensed project since November for free, and I intend to keep doing it. For reasons that I've blogged about rather a lot, on and off for YEARS:

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#12-12-2008
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#15-12-2009
http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#16-12-2011

And I was doing it because my infrastructure is BETTER:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-March/071...

And I mothballed and unmothballed it for years because it was fun to work on but I didn't think it could displace an existing project with a 10 year headstart no matter how much better it was:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#05-01-2010

Tim pointed out there was a demand for a BSD-licensed version. My decision to relicense toybox was back in November:

http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011

Since then I've written a number of commands, entirely hobbyist development:

http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/201...

Sigh. I have to go do day job things now, but I'll try to write up a comprehensive blog entry on on this tonight. In the meantime, I've commented rather a lot on the original blog, pointing out that Garrett's welcome to do his own darn license enforcement if he wants to, and if he hasn't written any code anybody actually _uses_ that's NOT MY PROBLEM.