About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 5, 2012 11:12 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by khim
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

An interesting argument I hadn't considered. In the interest of adding to your supposition I'll add the following. The theory of copyright infringement facilitation without engaging in actual infringement yourself has been used successfully in court several times in the US.

As you mention the first use was the Napster case that resulted in the entire company getting shut down. But there have been other cases, such as Limewire, Grokster and several other smaller players. In all the previous cases it was a civil lawsuit and involved the argument that centered around contributory copyright infringement and resulted in millions of dollars of damages. Most of the cases were appealed all the way to the Supreme and as such have established a fairly solid legal citation in future cases (baring a future reversal by the Supreme).

But more recently the MegaUpload cases presents a dramatic escalation in this with a criminal proceeding with racketeering charges tied in where the US government is seeking multiple years of jail time for the parties responsible. The theory you've presented is interesting because it's a well established precedent in US courts that contributory copyright infringement is a real and punishable offense.

The court verdicts to date have basically established the precedent that if the intent and use of the product was for the primary purpose of infringing copyright, even if there are legitimate uses that make up a small part of the use case, that the parties responsible are guilty of contributory copyright infringement for the behavior of their users. You have to wonder if these verdicts couldn't be stretched to extend to this situation. Although it'll be argued the intent wasn't to encourage GPL infringement (but to avoid a SFC legal action) by the people involved it should be fairly obvious that regardless, a significant number of people in the community and on LWN have interpreted the action to be an attempt to facilitate infringement and that this entire discussion would likely be used in the case, particularly the comments by those involved.

Would a GPL case extend to this level? I doubt it, but as you say history doesn't predict the future. With laws like SOPA in play an ambitious district attorney looking to get their name in the news could litigate a GPL case without the consent of copyright holder (one of the many scary clauses in the law).

An interesting hypothesis no doubt, thanks for posting it.

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 5, 2012 15:00 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (9 responses)

Now you can understand why I clearly distinguish Rob's work and Tim's work.

Rob just wrote yet another replacement for busybox - may be technically interesting, but legally pretty plain project. It used the same GPL which both busybox and Linux kernel are using thus it was not all that interesting from the legal perspective: yes, SFC had no way to enforce it's copyright, but thus was just Rob's goodwill, it was easy for him to change his mind at any time. Hardly a reason for a hypothetical sleazy company to be excited. And hardly anybody was excited: toybox was around for years but was mostly a curiosity not worth talking about much.

Tim, on the other hand, convinced Rob to change license and make it as close to public domain grant as possible. Now it becomes much easier to infringe on kernel's copyright. Tim even admits it's directly:
Q. Is this being done to prevent the SFC from asking for the source to the Linux kernel?
A. No, although it would have that effect. As part of their request to remedy a busybox GPL violation, the SFC does ask for source code unrelated to busybox. Personally, I believe this is improper. However, my main reason for proposing this project is to avoid having the SFC gain review authority over unrelated products produced by a company. The larger the set of Linux-based products that are produced by a company, the greater exposure there is for a possible mistake, and the greater potential costs that would incur in the event of litigation and/or settlement.
Of course he also continues with rhetoric that his goal is not to help copyright violators, etc, but... how much it helped other companies you've mentioned here?

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 0:18 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (8 responses)

No, Tim asked me if I knew anybody who'd want to work on extending Android's crappy Toolbox so people wouldn't need to replace it with software that can never ship as part of Android, due to Google's existing "no GPL in userspace" policy which most android vendors inherit:

http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html

_I_ am the one who brought up Toybox, and pointed out I already _had_ something that was way the heck ahead of Toolbox, and which I'd love an excuse to work on again.

And I have already been talking about the smartphone replacing the PC since BEFORE ANDROID EVEN EXISTED:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#09-10-2010

(The 2002 reference in that is about when I wrote an article on the topic for a now-defuct wesite called linux and main, I might be able to pull the article out of archive.org if I try. I note that Eric's objection was ergonomics would limit the usability of palm pilot and newton and such. There weren't any USB docking stations yet, but it seemed obvious to me that the problem would be solved, and that internet-through-cellphone was _compelling_. Yes, in 2002. And yes, I hit bad bufferbloat the first time I tried getting internet through my cell phone on Linux in 2001, I just had no idea what to _do_ about it and assumed I'd configured things wrong.)

I'm the one who made the connection that "Oh, if toybox was BSD licensed _that_ would give it a separate niche from busybox giving me an excuse to work on it without feeling like I was wasting my time, because android is a deployment platform that only bsd licensed code can fit in. And I could use that as leverage to steer android towards a more full-fledged posix environment, and from there it's a simple step towards leveraging my aboriginal linux project to make android self-hosting, and then android would have a leg up against the iPhone, which it's been losing to recently".

The enthusiasm was _mine_, because I saw a path forward I'd missed before, which Tim's agenda was just a tiny part of. Tim was actually going a different direction with it, by I got an idea talking with him.

It was an idea that FSF zealots really don't like, but they lost me in 2006:

http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#03-12-2006

And I've been drifting _away_ from the GPL ever since. Before you blame Tim for my "screw it, BSD license the sucker" decision, read this bit almost TWO YEARS EARLIER:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#10-01-2010

> Since uClibc's so obviously moribund, I'm vaguely pondering poking at
> Android's "bionic" project instead, and maybe even their "toolbox"
> project. The first is their libc (uClibc replacement) and the second is
> their coreutils (busybox replacement). They wrote their own because they
> decided they want all the userspace stuff to be BSD licensed, no GPL in
> userspace. Before GPLv3 came out I would have objected to this, but now
> it seems kind of reasonable. (If the FSF is really _that_crazy_, then
> you don't want to get any of it on you.)

And goes on to talk about the merits and drawbacks of BSD licensing.

This was me analyzing some more of Android's licensing decisions a year before I relicensed Toybox:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#09-10-2010

So by all means, consider me some kind of strange puppet for Tim that's unable to form any independent thoughts about licensing, let alone make informed decisions like an adult.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 10:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (7 responses)

If this is all about Android then why the page was started with talks about GPL infringement facilitation? It still talks about this aspect first and about potential usage in Android second.

Better userspace for Android will be easy sell. GPL infringement facilitator is not. Even if technically it's the same project.

P.S. Actually userspace for android is slightly different project because to support Dalvik you need different set of tools then to support traditional POSIX userspace.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:19 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

"We'd like to get as many patents as possible to protect ourselves from the insane patent system via mutually assured destruction and cross-licensing agreements."

"We'd like to get an alternative to BusyBox to protect ourselves from the insane out of control SFLC/SFC and their demands about third-party binary only kernel modules and vendor toolchains we've never even seen the source code to if we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox but didn't SAY we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox."

"We'd like to distance ourselves from this legal quagmire rather than try to navigate an endless shifting maze."

That's not _my_ motivation, but I can certainly see spraying for lawyers holding an appeal for people, especially when legal stuff isn't what they _do_. And if it makes 'em more likely to use the code I already _wrote_ and am still adding to (which is technically better than the alternative)? Sure, why not?

Rob

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:22 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (5 responses)

By the way, another analogy for all the insane GPL zealots to ponder:

Don't put lifeboats on your cruise ship. Make it unsinkable. By planning for what happens if the boat sinks, you're planning to sink the boat! Shame on you, lifeboats are EVIL!

Rob

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:21 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

You are not putting lifebots on a ship. You are adding couple of lifebots to Titanic.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If you don't expect for it to be sunk then why bother with lifebots at all? If you do expect crash and burn scenario then why do you plan to save just a handful of people, not all of them?

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 11, 2012 14:35 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ...

She had FAR more lifeboats than were legally required.

And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...)

(I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds.)

Cheers,
Wol

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 11, 2012 15:39 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ...

She had FAR more lifeboats than were legally required.

Sure. Law required just 16 lifeboats while Titanic had 20. With total capacity of 1,178 people on a ship with capacity of 3,547. Less then ⅓ space per person. Good idea. Not.

And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...)

That's another issue. Yes, even if you have enough lifeboats you still can lose a lot of lives in a case of crush. But if you don't have enough lifeboats to save all passengers then loss of life is inevitable.

I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds.

Sure. More then one space per person may be good idea. How much more is subject of the debate. Less then one space per person is pointless - and this is exactly how Titanic was equipped.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 12, 2012 15:51 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

btw, you might stand more chance of convincing people rather than repelling them if you didn't routinely call them insane. Just a thought.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 13, 2012 8:27 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

This is true. But I don't think Rob is calling all GPL zealots insane...? That's just a tiny subset.