Two different "risks" here

I personally started the busybox lawsuits. Erik Andersen had a "hall of shame" page during his 7 years of maintainership but, didn't do anything about it. He had his father send out cease and desist letters, but if they were ignored didn't follow up.

Erik did team up with Bradley Kuhn and Eben Moglen and so on to threaten to sue linksys circa 2003, although I believe _they_ approached _him_. (And possibly Harald Welte as well, I'd have to look it up; it was before I got involved.) That action was carefully targetted and gave us openwrt and derivatives. It also caused Linksys to cease all Linux development and migrate its devices to a proprietary embedded OS for several years, but this was considered worthwhile as part of a larger overall outcome. The "embedded home router niche" hadn't _existed_ before Linksys, and now it was a ground-breakingly cheap deployment platform for open source software.

But guess what? The team of people who were _threatening_ to sue Cisco over the GPL back in 2003? They didn't actually file suit:

http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys.html

All the work was done _out_ of court, and Cisco cooperated to _keep_ themselves out of court. The threat of a GPL lawsuit was just saber rattling to get Cisco's attention, they negotiated the release of source code _without_ever_filing_suit_.

I decided to experiment with filing actual suits to deal with the "Hall of Shame" I inherited from Erik Andersen when I took over as busybox maintainer. There was an existing, specific backlog of reports, which we expected to yield busybox code we could add to the repository. I asked Erik to cosign because he'd collected the hall of shame and what records there were consisted of his inbox, and the versions in question predated my maintainership and often my participation in busybox development. But Erik spent years not doing it, and setting the wheels in motion for it was one of my first acts as maintainer.

The 2003 Cisco effort, settled out of court without ever filing suit and yielding a mountain of useful code that opened up a new ecological niche to Linux, was nothing _like_ the current round of "sue first, ask questions later, and demand tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a commitment to keep paying protection money on every new product for years afterwards" the SFLC and SFC efforts have devolved into.

I'm now obsoleting the busybox lawsuits not _just_ because they drive companies away from Linux, but because nothing that's happened since 2006 has come even _close_ to openwrt. We got NOTHING OUT OF IT. All the open drivers for chips from nvidia and ati and broadcom and such we've gotten since then happened either because a company _chose_ to be nice (like Intel, hiring the xfree86 guys to push back against microsoft a bit), or because we _reverse_engineered_them_:

http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/announcement.pdf
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/the-forcedeth-st...
http://r300.sourceforge.net/
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

And so on. Sometimes Linux got support for hardware _FROM_ BSD:

http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/About/History

All this talk about lawsuits being necessary for hardware support does not match reality, and certainly was not the goal of the guy who started the suits (I.E. me).

I can show evidence that the "sue first and ask questions later" approach of stringing together a series of lawsuits to form a self-financing perpetual lawsuit machine that needs to be fed... that does way, way, way more harm than good. Because I started it, I consider stopping it (and thus ending that harm) to be my responsibility.

You're welcome to believe differently, but the facts do not support your position. I have first person experience here: you do not. You have presented no evidence in support of your position. I've asked for people to show me the code that came out of a busybox lawsuit and got merged, nobody has pointed at any. Instead they choose to weigh a purely theoretical benefit vs actual demonstrable harm.

In insulating your beliefs from challenge by facts, you are taking a position based on ideology, which does not match reality, and thus are a religious zealot, not an engineer. As with "eating meat on a friday" or "we only allow these sexual positions", it's easy to insist things are a sin a priori, because religious questions of morality do not actually require an underlying logic. Thus when logic fails, zealots start talking about morality without being able to show evidence of concrete harm to any specific persons.

(I can debate philosophy with you. But if you don't understand why I believe that we should put a teapot in orbit around Mars in honor of Bertrand Russell, you need to do some reading first.)

Rob

P.S. tl;dr - Bwahahahahahaha.