About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 1, 2012 23:49 UTC (Wed) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by PaulWay
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

Ultimately, what galls me here is that Sony isn't ponying up the developers to actually write the bits of Toybox that they want

I've already contributed personally to the code.

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 2, 2012 0:56 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

Personally as in, your own time or Sony? If Sony is supporting the project, you can't deflect criticism directed at Sony for exhibiting a level of hypocrisy. If it is your own time, the original criticism you are responding to, is still valid.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 2, 2012 1:13 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Except that, as Tim said before, replacing Busybox is not (at this time) a Sony project. Tim has said this would be a good idea, not Sony. Most of us like to be seen independently of the shadow of our employers, at least some of the time; I think we can grant Tim that favor too.

In a sense, Rahul, this is like us giving Red Hat grief for supporting rpmfusion - or not supporting it.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 2, 2012 1:51 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am very well willing to grant the favor to Tim but I want to clarify the details first. If Tim is working on behalf of Sony or if Sony is permitting Tim to work on this project during work hours, then regardless of whose project it is, there is a association which cannot denied and hence the action of the company reflects on the individual or vice versa.

If Tim is working on his own time, then of course, his association with Sony is not as relevant to this discussion but one cannot have it both ways.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 9, 2012 21:48 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> Personally as in, your own time or Sony?

Tim's own time:

http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/413

He credited his employer, but that's not unusual:

http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/436
http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2006-July/016032...

What exactly is the logic here in objecting, by the way?

"Oh no, Sony is sponsoring new open source code under a license that would allow the code to be used in the Linux kernel itself! Horrors!"

"Oh no, the guy who started the BusyBox lawsuits in the first place is rendering them irrelevant!"

"Oh no, people are writing BSD licensed command line utilities because w'eve never seen THAT before..."

"Oh no, this code may be actually better than BusyBox and intends to compete on the technical merits and win!"

Rob

(Sheesh, I mothballed the toybox project a couple years back because I didn't think beating busybox on technical merit was _enough_ to displace an entrenched competitor with a 10 year headstart, including several years of my own work. But I wouldn't have bothered in the first place if I didn't think I could do a better job on a purely engineering level.)