About the calculus for the project

> Rob wrote busybox replacement to solve some problems with busybox. No
> problem so far. Then later Tim comes along and convinces Rob to change the
> license citing SFC as the reason.

Except that's not what happened.

Tim was trying to start a project called "BentoBox", which most likely would extend Android's Toolbox, and if not would start over from scratch. He was doing so in his capacity as CELF guy (not a Sony guy) because a number of different manufacturers had approached _him_ looking for such a thing, and he thought that pooling their resources was better than each of them writing yet another half-assed bsd-licensed not-busybox (toolbox, bsdbox, beastiebox, sbase, who knows how many private ones behind closed doors?)

Initially, I told him I wasn't interested. And then I thought about it and went "A _billion_ android devices. They've already had five years to ship busybox and didn't. Something is going to fill that market vacuum, and when it does it will be BIG."

I also thought: I really liked working on toybox, I only stopped because I didn't think anybody would ever use the result, because no matter how technically better I make it, it would have to displace an existing "good enough" solution with a ten year headstart including years of my own work. But... market vacuum. Billions of seats. They're going to use SOMETHING...

Tim still hasn't paid me a dime, and may never do so. (I'd love it if he _did_, but that's not why I restarted Toybox.)

I am the one who chose to relicense toybox. I didn't wait for Tim to decide to redirect his bentobox thing, I didn't wait for anybody to come up with any money, or a marketing campaign, or even a promise to use it instead of going off and doing something else that would compete with it.

I decided that Toybox should be restarted as a BSD-licensed project (Tim was proposing Apache license for bentobox). It was my code, I'm the only one who _could_ relicense it, and I'm certainly the only one who could make me work on it.

I am not Tim's puppet. And I'm not your puppet either. I've been programming since I was 12, releasing the results for free since almost that long (300 baud modem to BBS's: the first program I wrote and uploaded was "The Bard's Tailor", an editor for C64 bard's tale game save files), and doing so as open source since 1998. I didn't even MEET Tim until 2006.

That's the annoying assumption here, that some large company is pulling the strings, it's a conspiracy! In reality, large companies haven't had time to REACT to any of this. Tim made a proposal Sony has yet to even _evaluate_, and he works for them! Fortune 500 corporations move very, very slowly. They haven't noticed this project EXISTS yet. I may have 1.0 out before they do.

Rob

P.S. And please: Tim citing SFC at _me_? I fell out with SFLC before SFC forked off from them, I was very public about it in my blog, and have linked those old blog entries here ad nauseam. The no GPL in userspace thing is an Android policy which my _current_ employer (Polycom, I work in board bringup which has nothing to do with any of this) has adopted itself for Android products it ships (basically all new ones). I.E. the team I personally work on at my day job does board bringup in vanilla-ish Linux (A TI fork thereof, anyway; we recently got to upgrade to 2.6.37!), and then once we've made all the hardware work the prototypes get reformatted and handed off to a completely separate set of developers who install an android kernel (again from TI) and userspace, and write a Java GUI that runs in Dalvik and gets packaged into an apk file to install into Android. Those guys can't use _any_ GPL stuff in userspace. The only reason _we_ get to is that none of the userspace code we write ever _ships_. We're mostly just figuring out which wires aren't connected up right and which existing drivers don't do what we need them to so the vendor (TI) can fix 'em.