Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

I still retain my original copyrights to all the code I contributed to busybox. The SFLC's right to represent those copyrights was terminated in 2008. They still have Erik Andersen and Denys Vlasenko on board, but I have standards documents and man pages to point to as implementing documented standards, and all my code's public if you'd like to compare for similarity.

Oh, and Bruce Fscking Perens got the idea of a swiss-army-knife executable from gzip, it was not original with him:

http://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt

I started toybox in 2006 in part because Bruce's GPLv3 trolling made busybox unpleasant to even _look_ at for me (http://lwn.net/Articles/202106/), but I still wanted to work on that _kind_ of thing because I felt I could do a BETTER JOB, from an engineering standpoint. Which means a radically different implementation.

I solved the _technical_ challenges, but then had to figure out whether or not to continue the project in context with busybox. I explicitly mentioned "undermining my hand-picked successor" on busybox as a reason NOT to continue:

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#30-06-2008

And didn't... until the market vacuum on android was pointed out to me by Tim. Toybox was all my code, which I could BSD license if I wanted to, and I thought it over fairly extensively before doing so:

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

Years ago I wouldn't have considered doing so, but now?

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

Bring it.