Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC

I'm not going to say that you are wrong, on either count. But there is an interesting point here.

It seems that, for you, the goal is to have busybox as widely used/deployed as possible. That's fine, and laudable. But then why release your code under the GPLv2 to begin with? Why not a permissive license instead?

You see, that's not what _I_ am after. I want my code to be Libre; I want my my users and my users' users to have the same rights to use and modify my code. Sure, that means I'll have fewer users. But you know what? I'm okay with that. Those folks can pay to get what they want instead, and that's going to cost them a lot more than including a source code tarball on their web site.

Meanwhile, I've nearly been sued twice by companies; one was actively distributing my code to their customers and the other was directly using it in their products. And yes, the latter one dropped things quite quickly when it became apparent that _I_ was the one who had them by their metaphorical balls. Copyleft is what gave me that leverage.

Also, let's be honest, nobody acually cares about busybox in of itself as hardly anyone actually _modifies_ it. (Side note -- over a decade ago, my employer actually did make some nontrivial busybox changes, and we unsuccessfully attempted to contribute our code back upstream. C'est la vie. But we also distributed complete corresponding source code to all GPL'd stuff we shipped.) Meanwhile, folks actually _do_ care about Linux (and U-Boot) because those are nearly always required to be modified in order for new hardware to function properly.