A tempest in a toybox

I really must thank you for the Streisand Effect publicity: more developers have signed up to the toybox mailing list in the past 2 weeks than in the previous 2 years. I labored on this thing in complete obscurity in 2006-2010 (under GPLv2, no less) for 377 repository commits. Now I've merged three new externally submitted commands in the past week, all from new developers who found out about it from lwn and h-online and such. In fact I should probably cut a release this weekend...

So thanks for the signal boost. If you really want to personally pick up the sisyphos role of scaring developers away from open source via the legal system, good luck with it. Android's already written GPL off but I'm sure you can squeeze more out. I found it's easy to find lawyers happy to take companies' money, and really hard to get useful code out of the process. (Way, way, way more time and work than just writing it yourself.)

It's pretty easy to go after small fry and declare them "no longer in violation" after they go out of business or give your lawyers a lot of money and a random useless tarball of stuff you've already got to become technically compliant without ever actually producing any useful code because there _wasn't_ any. And you can draw it out _forever_ by suing "Board Support Package" customers, but not the BSP vendors who added the new drivers and never gave their customers complete source in the first place, and rack up an endless string of meaningless "victories" that way.

Personally? Been there. Done that. It gets old.

Rob

(I asked the SFLC why they sued Cisco instead of Broadcom, since they were complaining about a Broadcom BSP toolchain Cisco never _had_ the source code to. I never did get a clear answer to that one. I believe they said the FSF was the plaintiff not the busybox developers, so they couldn't discuss details of the case with me, or something like that.)